Research suggests that infants progress from discrimination to recognition of emotions in faces during the first half year of life. It is whether the perception of emotions from bodies develops in a similar manner. In the current study, when presented with happy and angry body videos and voices, 5-month-olds looked longer at the matching video when they were presented upright but not when they were inverted. In contrast, 3.5-month-olds failed to match even with upright videos. Thus, 5-month-olds but not 3.5-month-olds exhibited evidence of recognition of emotions from bodies by demonstrating intermodal matching. In a subsequent experiment, younger infants did discriminate between body emotion videos but failed to exhibit an inversion effect, suggesting that discrimination may be based on low-level stimulus features. These results document a developmental change from discrimination based on non-emotional information at 3.5 months to recognition of body emotions at 5 months. This pattern of development is similar to face emotion knowledge development and suggests that both the face and body emotion perception systems develop rapidly during the first half year of life.

<p>The essay aims to highlight the newly arrived immigrant students’ experience of social integration and social security in the Swedish school system, which is important for their further language and learning development. This essay aims to see it from the student's perspective. The main question in this essay is: What factors seem to matter the most for the newly arrived immigrant students in their language and learning skills, and what does the students themselves think about the issue? The study is based on a qualitative research method in the form of interviews and observations conducted in a multicultural school for a period of two weeks. Three newly-arrived students are in this essay being observed while they are attending between two different classrooms: the so-called preparation classroom and the ordinary classroom. This essay aims to highlight a newly arrived student's development from a socio-cultural perspective. The results show that the newly arrived students felt more emotionally secure while attending the preparation classrooms, and while attending the ordinary classrooms they felt more inadequate.</p>

Planning has lent legitimacy to the development of society through the application of different theories and practices. With its embodied concepts and values, planning influences the direction of change that a society may achieve. Given the great role that planning plays in shaping societies over long periods of time, in situations where it is planning knowledge that is subject to travel between nations, consideration of the context specificity is particularity essential. This thesis deals with the complex process of transferring collaborative planning knowledge to a different institutional and cultural context. The research adopts a proactive approach, examining the practical and theoretical potential imbued in a new context. It is argued, in this work, that an exogenous planning model has to be re-contextualized and landed in a new context through its assimilation with that context’s history and cultural values. The research focuses on Egypt and is directed towards understanding the specificities of the Egyptian institutional context and the cultural values inherited from the history of Egyptian society. The author’s interest lies in addressing the ways in which such an understanding can contribute to the development of collaborative planning knowledge. The research strategy is designed with reference to the cross-cultural transfer of knowledge and the study utilises an action research approach through which the author plays the dual role of practitioner and action researcher. Implementing collaborative planning in the Egyptian urban context of the city of Zifta provided a valuable opportunity to understand how planning knowledge may be transferred between different cultural contexts. The intellectual foundations for the collaborative principle is scrutinised, and complemented by an examination of Egyptian social philosophy. A conceptual framework for the joint development of knowledge in cross-cultural planning research is put forward, which derives from a combination of the practical and theoretical investigations carried out. / <p>QC 20121003</p>

The essay aims to highlight the newly arrived immigrant students’ experience of social integration and social security in the Swedish school system, which is important for their further language and learning development. This essay aims to see it from the student's perspective. The main question in this essay is: What factors seem to matter the most for the newly arrived immigrant students in their language and learning skills, and what does the students themselves think about the issue? The study is based on a qualitative research method in the form of interviews and observations conducted in a multicultural school for a period of two weeks. Three newly-arrived students are in this essay being observed while they are attending between two different classrooms: the so-called preparation classroom and the ordinary classroom. This essay aims to highlight a newly arrived student's development from a socio-cultural perspective. The results show that the newly arrived students felt more emotionally secure while attending the preparation classrooms, and while attending the ordinary classrooms they felt more inadequate.

This thesis investigates personal knowledge development in online learning environments and the impact that personal values have on it. Personal knowledge development was investigated from the perspective of Nonaka’s SECI model of organisational knowledge creation. This model served as the basis for an adapted model that conceptualises personal knowledge development in online learning at the individual level. The personal value types of the Schwartz Value Survey and the Portrait Values Questionnaire were adopted to measure personal values and their impact on personal knowledge development in online learning environments. Three data collection approaches were used. First, an exploratory study was conducted which elicited online learners’ experiences of their personal knowledge development in online learning; this study used online discussion forums for data collection. Second, a Delphi study was carried out. Experts were asked which of the ten individual-level value types by Schwartz are likely to be particularly relevant in the context of online learning. Third, an online survey was created. Its aim was to measure the impact that personal values and background variables, such as gender and age, have on personal knowledge development in online learning. A measurement instrument was devised that measures three of the SECI modes, namely Externalisation, Combination and Internalisation. This instrument measures the magnitude of online learners’ Externalisation and Combination activities as well as their level of Internalisation, i.e. the outcomes of personal knowledge development. Results of the exploratory study show that there are widely diverging experiences of personal knowledge development in online learning. The literature review suggests that the cultural situatedness of an online learning environment is an important influencing factor on personal knowledge development. The results of the Delphi study suggest that Self-Direction, Stimulation, and Achievement are particularly relevant value types in the context investigated here. Finally, the online survey confirms this view, as all three value types were found to be positively correlated with Externalisation, Combination, and Internalisation, with the exception of the Achievement-Combination relationship. A modified version of the SECI model is proposed, which extends the applicability of the original SECI model from the organisational to the individual level. It is argued that this model is suitable to describe personal knowledge development in the context of online learning. The study also contributes to closing the gap in research on the impact of personal values in the context investigated in this study. Moreover, a measurement instrument was created that can be used to measure Externalisation and Combination, i.e. personal knowledge development processes, and Internalisation, i.e. personal knowledge development outcomes.

Among scholars of applied linguistics and composition studies, the notion of academic literacy has generated discussions regarding L2 students' intellectual growth and academic performance in the college context. Several studies provide a detailed account of how students adapt their literacy practices in response to their perceived needs for task completion; however, as the notion of academic literacy has gradually been linked to concerns of disciplinary enculturation, a situated process of becoming involved in disciplinary discourse, there has been a call for attention to the disciplinary discourse communities into which students are initiated through literacy tasks. Although some previous studies have forged early linkages and integrated disciplinary discourse into the notion of academic literacy, the empirical data comes from graduate students (Casanave, 2002; Prior, 1998) or L1 students (Hass, 1994; Herrington, 1985; Sternglass, 1997). The study reported in this dissertation, however, investigates the situated and enculturating literacy practices of L2 students in undergraduate settings. Also, as compared to previous studies that describe the literacy strategies in or students' views of disciplinary discourse, the present study attempts to schematize the connection between literacy practice and disciplinary enculturation, drawing on the notion of genre and its framework. This study has a clear focus of analysis by discussing the literacy practice of two L2 students as they engage in genres, mostly written work, in class, herein referred to as genre practice or genre-mediated literacy practice. This study follows the L2 students' learning throughout their undergraduate college experience, providing an analysis of their genre practice across disciplines from their first year to graduation, and at the same time tracing the factors that contextualize their genre practice, such as previous genre encounters, class work, writing assignment guidelines, cultural norms, individualized perceptions of disciplinary expectations, etc. Through careful textual analysis and interviews, this study focuses on the L2 students' developing academic literacy as mediated by discipline-specific genre practice in three different learning contexts: writing in general education courses, writing in business writing courses, and writing in courses in their majors. The results of the study show that both students' genre practices varied, depending on how genre was cued, interpreted, and performed, by social affordances such as lectures, class readings, class discussions, and interactions with peers and instructors. The study shows the students' genre practice taking shape in the way they were situated in disciplinary discourse, while at the same time their understanding of disciplinary discourse was mediated by their engagement in genre. In addition, by looking at the students' genre practice in four different knowledge dimensions—formal, rhetorical, procedural, and subject matter (see Tardy, 2009)—this study documents a detailed process of constructing discipline-specific literacy. Despite its context-dependent, individualized positioning in disciplinary discourse, this study captures a series of patterns of literacy practice cutting across the two L2 students' approach to genre and highlights the issues inherent in classroom-based instructional settings. The theoretical and pedagogical implications of this study suggest the need to reexamine the role of writing for discipline-specific literacy, both to enhance college writing instruction and to advocate for writing across the curriculum.

Syftet med denna studie är att undersöka hur några lärare på gymnasiesärskolans nationella program arbetar med bedömning av elevernas kunskapsutveckling samt hur dessa lärare arbetar för att eleverna ska kunna synliggöra sina kunskaper. Studien baseras på sju halvstrukturerade intervjuer med lärare som undervisar i svenska på gymnasiesärskolan.  Resultatet visar att lärarna använder sig av många olika metoder för att skaffa underlag för  kunskapsbedömning. Samtal, observationer och dokumentation är några exempel. Lärarna arbetar tätt ihop med eleverna och ger konkret, tät återkoppling för att synliggöra kunskapsutvecklingen både för eleven och sig själva. Eleverna behöver mycket stöttning och repetition för att utveckla kunskaper och självständighet i arbetet. Ett dilemma som framträder är att det är svårt att skapa förutsättningar för alla elever att kunna visa fram sina kunskaper. Det vanligaste är att man sitter bredvid och samtalar med eleven för att ta reda på vilka kunskaper eleven har tillägnat sig. Lärande som en social företeelse som sker i samspel med andra är ett synsätt som skiner igenom. Enligt min studie är det oftast eleven och läraren som samspelar med varandra. / The aim of this study is to explore how a few teachers in the upper secondary school’s national programmes for pupils with intellectual disabilities work with assessing the knowledge development in students and how these teachers work for the pupils to be able to make their own knowledge visible.   The study is based upon seven semi structured interviews with teachers teaching Swedish in upper secondary schools for pupils with intellectual disabilities.  The results show that the teachers use multiple methods to acquire ground for assessment of knowledge. Conversation, observation and documentation are some examples of methods. The teachers work closely together with the students and provide tangible, frequent feedback to make the knowledge development visible both to the student and themselves. The students need a lot of scaffolding and repetition to develop knowledge and independence in their work. An emerging dilemma is the difficulty to create opportunities for all students to communicate their knowledge. The most common strategy is to sit beside the student and have a conversation to find out what knowledge the student has acquired. Learning as a social experience which occurs in interaction with others is a line of approach that shines through. According to my study it is most commonly the student and the teacher who are interacting with each other.

This diploma thesis deals with the process of learning, knowledge management and the concept of learning organization as strategic directions in the field of education, learning and development of employees. The theoretical part describes knowledge management as an essential part of the management of a successfully functioning and continuously developing organization, which is exposed to increasing pressure of competition, demanding clients and economic burden. In this case the setting of corporate culture towards the learning organization is equally important. Since the organization set up in this direction has created a suitable environment for the effective development of knowledge, skills and experience, not only in the classical form of lifelong learning, which is given in case of the general nurses by legislation, but above all the creation, development and transfer of knowledge between individuals and the team is emphasized. In the practical part, first the selected organization is analyzed including analysis of fulfilling the criteria of the learning organization followed by the qualitative research devoted in the first stage to mapping the system of education and development of the employees in the organization and in the second phase to finding the attitudes of the nurses within a...

Today’s modern society is multicultural, school is therefore a meeting place for pupils withdifferent experiences, prior knowledge, and mother tongue. Second language students whohave not yet developed good skills in various subject languages, face several challenges inupper secondary school. To succeed in different school subjects these students need todevelop language that is specialized for each school subject. The purpose of this study is toexamine how social science teachers in the upper secondary school experience and work withsecond language students who have difficulties with content-based language. The appliedmethod in the study is qualitative interviews. The theoretical framework is based on differentconcepts of literacy to analyze the results. The results in this study show that the teachers useboth similar and different methods to develop second language students’ understanding ofconcepts, reading, and writing skills, subject language, and subject knowledge. However,several differences between teachers’ perceptions and approaches are also discerned. Theteachers in this study understand the importance of placing the language in focus within thesubject, however some of the teachers experience difficulties with integrating language andsubject into the teaching.

Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) is a dual focused pedagogical practice in which a language other than the students’ first language is taught through content. CLIL has grown to become a popular pedagogic approach within education systems across the world. However, research conducted in Swedish primary schools is extremely limited. Therefore, the aim of this study is to provide an insight into what factors are of relevance for the practice to be successful, as well as whether an implementation of the approach in the Swedish educational system would be beneficial. The study presents an overview regarding previous research and relevant theoretical perspectives. Semi-structured interviews with five primary school teachers in the south of Sweden were conducted for this study. The results reveal numerous beneficial factors, such as the students’ language skills and knowledge skills developing simultaneously in meaningful contexts. An additional beneficial factor expressed by all the interviewed teachers is the development of the students’ interculturality, which is stated as a key skill to develop through English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teaching by the Swedish National Board of Education (Skolverket). However, the conclusion demonstrates that the major challenges are the lack of a set framework and adapted materials available in Sweden for the pedagogical practice.