To evaluate activities that effect better parent-teacher cooperation in relation to child development and welfare is the purpose of this study. The five types of activities about which information was desired included personal conferences, communication, parent-teacher association, visitation, and parental education.

The Children's Communication Checklist-Second Edition (CCC-2) is a behavior rating scale developed to address the difficulties of assessing social communication in children. It was designed to be completed by a parent rater. However, since it would be helpful to know the extent to which ratings are context-dependent, this study looked at the agreement between parent and teacher ratings on the CCC-2 as well as the percent agreement on the severity of disorder. Twelve parent-teacher pairs completed the CCC-2 for children who had a documented developmental language disorder with specific impairment in social communication. Cohen's kappas, Cohen's weighted kappas, and percent agreement of severity of disorder were calculated. Kappa results ranged from less than chance agreement to fair agreement. When differentiating between scores that represent disorder and no disorder, parent and teacher percent agreement for the CCC-2 10 subscales range from 42% to 75%. Further delineation between no disorder, disorder, or severe disorder yielded percent agreement ranging from 17% to 50%. Overall percent agreement on the general communication composite was 92%. Results indicate that while parents and teachers have poor to fair agreement on the exact nature of a child's social communication strengths and weaknesses, they largely agree when a social communication problem exists. Lack of agreement likely resulted from the parent and teacher seeing the child in different contexts which required a somewhat different set of social communication abilities, or a difference in rater perception of what is within the developmental norms. These findings suggest that the best indication of a child's social communication profile may lie in a holistic assessment of performance in all the important contexts in a child's life, including school and home.

With a phenomenographic perspective this thesis aims to study preschool teachers experiences of parent cooperation. In order to complete the aim of this study we have formulated three inquiries:     What qualifications do the preschool teacher consider contributing to good cooperation?     What qualifications do the preschool teacher consider leads to a lack of cooperation?    What appears as power relationships in the preschool teacher experiences?     According to the curriculum, preschool teacher requires to build trustworthy relations with parents. This appears to be a complex task. With a quantitative method the data in this study consist of seven interviews with preschool teachers that work in preschools. With our phenomenographic approach we were able to find different categories from the preschool teachers experienced narratives. This thesis consists of an inductive study where the preschool teachers narratives determine our theoretical notions. The notions are: Cooperation, communication, attachment relationship, intercultural knowledge and empowerment, the conclusion of the study reveals that power relations exist between parents and preschool teachers, the teachers have a power position because of their knowledge and parents because of their right to choose among preschools. The study shows that the task to please parents needs can be difficult, it also shows that misunderstandings and the increased number of children in the group aggravates the mission to fulfil the curriculum assignment regarding cooperation with parents. The result also shows that creating a trustful relation with mutual understanding of each other differences can lead to improve the cooperation.