Research reports as PISA and PIRLS show that reading comprehension among Swedish students have deteriorated in recent years and that girls have better reading comprehension than boys. The basis for this study is Maj-Gun Johansson's reading comprehension test done during the four years between the years 2005-2008 in the seventh grade in a municipality in Sweden. The main purpose of this study is to examine reading literacy in terms of the influence of content and form of texts viewed from a gender perspective. The study is divided into two parts. The first part is a survey on local reading comprehension compared with results from a similar national text.

The purpose of this study was to examine what social workers include in the term "parenting ability". More specifically the purpose was to investigate how social workers view the parenting ability among parents with an intellectual disability. Furthermore the aim was to examine what difficulties social workers come across in their work with families where one of the parents are intellectually disabled. The study was based on six interviews with social workers that specifically work with children under the age of 18, and occasionally come across parents with this type of disability. The interviews were analysed using Donald Winnicott's terms "good-enough-parenting", "holding" and "the holding environment".

The aim of this Master?s thesis is to examine the reading support activities performed by the school libraries of five Swedish upper secondary schools. It focuses upon fiction reading. Two main research questions are asked: the first one in order to find out what kind of ideas of fiction, fiction reading and young people that are held by the librarians of the five libraries, the second one in order to find out what the motives behind the reading support activities are. One additional research question is asked to examine how the librarians estimate the results of the reading support activities, and furthermore how the students seem to respond to them.

The aim of this Master?s thesis is to investigate if the reading habits of teacher students are influenced by merit and descent. The empiric material consists of six questionnaires answered by students at the teacher training with Swedish at the upper secondary school as their first topic. The questionnaire comprised questions about reading habits in the childhood and today and information concerning merits and descent.Pierre Bourdieu?s sociological ideas about cultural capital transmitted from parent to child and the concept of habitus are used as a theoretical framework regarding descent.

Swedish students' knowledge of both mathematics and reading comprehension has deteriorated in recent years. Scientists are discussing whether there is a connection between these areas and that the pupils deteriorating math skills may have something to do with their increasingly lower results in terms of reading comprehension. To investigate this possible connection, I conducted a survey among students in ninth grade and have come to the conclusion that the scientists are right: this connection absolutely exist. Students who received a high score on tasks designed to test students' mathematical problem-solving skills, also received high results on the reading comprehension test. And students who received a poor performance on the problem-solving tasks, were also low performers in the reading comprehension test.

The purpose of this work has been to understand the reading group from the perspective of the society. The studyhas taken place in the city of Västerås and the results can thus not be used in a more generalized sence. Byfocusstudies conducted with members from four different reading groups connected in different ways to the libraryin Västerås I have reached the following conclusions.According to Jürgen Habermas theories the reading groups, with their ideals regarding education and meetingswhere everybody are equals, belong in the part of the public sphere that he calls literary. There are someconnections to the political sphere, for exempel the down to earth quality of the literature that is the choice ofthe groups and their way of discussing it.One problem that occures when one tries to apply Habermas idéas regarding the public sphere on readinggroups is that the criteria Habermas considers as vital to sphere for it to work properly does not seem to workon the reading groups. Inclusion, eqality and freedom of subjects are necessary to create a public sphere.

The aim of this Masters thesis is to analyse school librarians and teachers perspective of childrens reading and reading progress, the impact of informational texts on childrens reading and how school librarians and teachers work/teach to improve their students understanding of informational texts. We also intend to study what consequences school librarians and teachers believe that childrens reduced understanding of informational texts can have in the long run and how this could be improved. The theories applied encompass different literature-pedagogical strategies, theories about reading purpose and direction of the reading process together with a theory that shows the school librarys function in the education. The empirical material has been collected through interviews with one school librarian and one teacher at three different schools. The material has then been analysed and interpreted from theories and earlier research.

This study, based on the socio-cultural theory of the book as a mediating tool, examines how four teachers say they work with the reader ABC-klubben. This is done with a focus on how they reason about choosing the level of readers for the pupils and about what compensation, if any, they make for pupils who read the simpler book and therefore miss the more difficult words and expressions. The result shows that all the teachers say that they take the pupils? motivation for and pleasure in reading as an important ground for the decision as to which reader a pupil should use, and that this decision is taken with a focus on the individual. When it comes to compensation for the pupils who read the simpler book, the teachers do not describe consistently focused work on this, but they describe a similar way of working whereby they nevertheless acquaint these pupils with the more difficult book and the harder words and expressions.

The aim of this study has been to get a better knowledge and understanding of the way teachers are working with reading comprehension in the grades 1 and 2, which was done through description of 5 teachers way of working.The theoretical basis of this study grounds in the sociocultural perspective. I based my study on Vygotsky?s theory which claims that strategies transferred from adults to children through social interaction get internalised and then used independently. I have also made use of several theories that specifically deal with reading comprehension that allowed me to identify this area of teaching as a complex one, consisting of several elements. In order to understand a text on a deeper level a reader has to be able to infer, or read between the lines.

This bachelor thesis is studying the development of Swedish law in relation with EU-law. There are two different points of view expressed in the theories of Europeanization. One that means EU makes a big influence on national policy, one that says path-dependency will make the national policies differ. The case used in the study is discrimination on the ground of disability as regards employment. The aim of this thesis is, through a case study, to analyze the relation between Swedish and European law and by that shed some light on the matter of Europeanization..

Individual adaption to the student´s needs is a recurring main theme in the new Swedish curriculum (Lgr11). The purpose of this qualitative study is to examine how teachers work with individual adjustment for students with reading and writing difficulties. The study was based on five questions;In what way do teachers organize their teaching in the classroom individually for students with reading and writing difficulties?What methods do they use for student´s with reading and writing difficulties?What difficulties do they encounter in their teaching?How do the teachers reason to curriculum goals regarding individual adaptions?How do they think about their own knowledge regarding reading- and writing difficulties and dyslexia?The method for my study was qualitative interviews. Five teachers were interviewed in semi-structured interviews.

Swedish students' knowledge of both mathematics and reading comprehension has deteriorated in recent years. Scientists are discussing whether there is a connection between these areas and that the pupils deteriorating math skills may have something to do with their increasingly lower results in terms of reading comprehension. To investigate this possible connection, I conducted a survey among students in ninth grade and have come to the conclusion that the scientists are right: this connection absolutely exist. Students who received a high score on tasks designed to test students' mathematical problem-solving skills, also received high results on the reading comprehension test. And students who received a poor performance on the problem-solving tasks, were also low performers in the reading comprehension test.

The aim in the study is to search for a deeper understanding of how parents experience a neurological diagnose of the child and how this affects the parenthood. Parenthood was seen in a systemtheoretical perspective as a social construction. The narrative method was used in two lifestory parentinterviews. The analysis was made from parenthood. The result formed stories about parenthood with children having neuropsyciatric functional disability who even came to be a woman?s struggle.

The aim of this master thesis is to investigate and illustrate the measures that parents, teachers and school librarians can take in order to influence childrens reading, and, more importantly, how these attempts performed by the adults in the childs environment affect the reading habits of the child. The methods used include qualitative interviews, undertaken with eight students/children, their teacher and a school librarian, and an observation of a book talk in the studied class. Considering that no interviews have been executed with the parents, the results presented regarding the parents prospects of encouraging childrens reading, are therefore to be seen from the perspective of the children, and analysed as such. Three different theories have been employed in order to elucidate the results of the study; Bourdieus theory about the cultural capital transmitted from parent to child; Aidan Chambers theory on the book talk as promoting reading; and Louise Limbergs theory on the levels of the school library and its consequent prognosis of working to promote reading. The results of the study concur with Bourdieus theory, in that the childrens reading habits in most cases seem to have been affected by the amount of involvement that the parents have given to promote their reading.

AbstractThe purpose with this study is to find out how pedagogues, who teach in the early years of primary school, motivate and stimulate all pupils so they want to read a lot of fiction. The research also includes finding out more about why the pedagogues work as they do. The research starts with a study of current literature which deals with how teachers should work with motivation and stimulation in school. To find out how the pedagogues work in school I have made qualitative interviews with four pedagogues who work in the early years of primary school. The result shows that all of the pedagogues motivate and stimulate pupils in similar ways.