Syftet med denna kvalitativa studie är att beskriva hur förebyggande arbete mot läs- och skrivsvårigheter sker i praktiken med kartläggningsmaterialet LegiLexi, i årskurserna F-3.  Genom att lyfta fram några lärares och speciallärares uppfattningar om att upptäcka, samt förebygga läs- och skrivsvårigheter, vill jag bidra med kunskap om hur detta arbete kan se ut. Jag är även intresserad av att undersöka återkoppling till eleverna utifrån LegiLexis resultat. Studiens fyra frågeställningar handlar om att upptäcka och förebygga läs- och skrivsvårigheter, samt om återkoppling till elever. LegiLexi är en icke vinstdrivande stiftelse som har utformat ett digitalt kartläggningsmaterial inom läsning, som baserar sig på forskning och beprövad erfarenhet. LegiLexi utvecklades efter inspiration från Response to intervention (RTI) och formativ bedömning. LegiLexi bygger på den väletablerade teoretiska modellen The simple view of reading (Gough & Tunmer 1986), vilken förklarar läsningens olika delar. Denna studie tar sin utgångspunkt i samma teoretiska modell och bygger på kvalitativa semistrukturerade intervjuer med nio respondenter. De transkriberade intervjuerna har analyserats med stöd av Braun och Clarkes (2006) modell för tematisk analys. Detta har genererat fem olika teman: Ett finmaskigt nät, Lärare behöver och efterfrågar fortbildning, Återkoppling till eleverna varierar, Evidensbaserade och strukturerade insatser underlättas, samt Föräldrar som resurs. Slutsatsen är att respondenter beskriver ett arbete som verkar mer inspirerat av RTI, än av formativ bedömning. De flesta insatser riktade till elever med störst svårigheter genomförs av speciallärare utanför klassrummet. Inom RTI motsvarar detta tier 3, medan insatser i mindre grupp (tier 2) och i klassrumsundervisning (tier 1) beskrivs mer sällan.

Bristande avkodningsförmåga skapar hinder i elevers kunskapsinhämtning. Det är en pedagogisk utmaning att kunna bemöta och stötta mellanstadieelever, d.v.s. elever i årskurs 4–6, med avkodningssvårigheter i deras utveckling i den dagliga undervisningen. Där behövs det rätt kunskap, kompetens och samarbete mellan olika skolprofessioner. Andra avgörande faktorer är skolors fungerande rutiner för tidig identifiering av elever med avkodningssvårigheter och tydliga riktlinjer för efterarbete med screeningresultaten. Syftet med denna studie är att öka kunskapen om speciallärares och ämneslärares perspektiv på avkodningssvårigheter och avkodningsundervisning i samband med elever på mellanstadiet. Deteoretiska utgångspunkterna som har varit vägledande under arbetet med denna studie är; teorin The Simple View of Reading, som ger kunskap om hur kognitiva och språkliga faktorer kan påverka elevers läsförmåga samt Skrtics teori om byråkrati inom skolorganisationen. Studien består av fyra semistrukturerade intervjuer av speciallärare och fyra semistrukturerade intervjuer av ämneslärare. Den insamlade empirin utmynnade i sex analysobjekt; definition av avkodning, tecken på avkodningssvårigheter, avkodningsträning, kompensation och samarbete mellan speciallärare och ämneslärare. Dessa analysobjekt användes sedan som rubriker i resultatdelen. De sammantagna resultaten visar att den undervisning som organiseras inom ramen för klassrumsundervisning inte alltid har det primära syftet att öva avkodning. Av resultaten framkommer att samsyn och samarbete mellan olika yrkesprofessioner krävs för att det ska kunna uppstå ett didaktiskt möte med god kvalitet. Samverkan mellan speciallärare och ämneslärare bidrar till att elevernas varierande behov kan bemötas. Av resultaten framkommer att det finns strukturer inom skolsystemet som försvårar för ämneslärare och speciallärare att samarbeta för att organisera avkodningsträning för elever med avkodningssvårigheter. Det är matchningen mellan elevernas varierande förutsättningar och behov samt lärarnas olika kompetenser som verkar skapa organisatoriska utmaningar för skolans ledare. Ett samarbete där man utbyter kunskaper och erfarenheter och vågar gå ifrån standardiserade lösningar för att pröva på nya, kan vara vägen till en excellent undervisning som vilar på en demokratisk grund.

Among ongoing concerns for firms is the need to remain relevant and competitive. To address these concerns, firms often turn to technology to meet rapidly changing consumer demands, to provide differentiated offerings and to increase firm efficiency and productivity. Thus, the decision-making process that leads to the adoption of new technology is of great importance to marketers. Grounded in the resource-based view of the firm, this dissertation examines absorptive capacity and technological opportunism as firm dynamic capabilities and their role in delivering successful, firm-level technology adoption decisions. This research also examines the moderating role of internal micro-politics on the technology adoption process. With a qualitative and quantitative approach, this dissertation develops and tests an empirical model of the firm-level adoption decision process and its outcomes. Theoretical and empirical evidence provided by this research offers insights into the firm-level technology adoption process that should be of value to both researchers and practitioners. Analyses show that firm absorptive capacity and technological opportunism are instrumental in shaping the firm’s perceptions of a transformational technology, which in turn positively influences overall satisfaction with the adopted technology. In contrast to theoretical support, results also show that the positive relationship between a firm’s dynamic capabilities and its perceptions of a technology’s characteristics is negatively influenced by the presence of micro-political strategies used to garner internal buy-in and support for the technology adoption decision. These findings indicate marketers of technology should utilize this knowledge to guide client firms through the technology adoption process based on evaluations of the client firm’s level of dynamic capabilities and micro-political environment. Further, managers seeking to enhance product or service offerings through technology adoption should seek to develop their dynamic capabilities that inform adoption decisions. Additionally, managers should carefully manage stakeholder relationships to minimize any negative influence micro-political strategies may have on the decision-making process. Study limitations and areas of future research are also discussed.

De Quincey's writing has already been thoroughly examined from the point of view of his critical statements, and attempts have been made to resolve some of the many contradictions which occur in such statements. In this thesis, however, De Quincey's work is approached not from a consideration of critical theory but through an examination of his ideas and techniques as they related to the well established literary and psychological category of the sublime. De Quincey's interpretation of the sublime in literature relates closely to his theory of the literature of power, and provides a central standpoint from which to examine many different aspects of his writing. De Quincey's general application of the theory of sublimity reveals a concentration upon a certain number of fixed formulae which can be used as guidelines to his criticism of literature as well as his own creative processes. De Quincey's ideas relating to sublimity provide, in addition, a religious and philosophical background from which to approach both the areas of criticism and creation. Ideas connected with the sublime also allow a convenient approach to De Quincey's theory of symbolism, his use of opium, and the dreams which haunted his life and became the substance of his creative writing. To observe the close relationship between these various aspects of De Quincey's life and thought is to become aware of the patterns which dominated his literary processes. Having shown the various modes of the sublime as exemplified by De Quincey's works in general, the thesis proceeds to a detailed examination of some passages in his literary criticism as they specifically relate to these modes. The emphasis is not upon the value and meaning of the criticism per se, but rather upon the extent to which it expresses De Quincey's continuing search for the powerful or sublime effect in literature. The critical contexts examined are seen to function on the basic principles already established, and these same principles are then applied to De Quincey's major fiction. The same patterns, involving paradox, symbolism and revelation, are clearly in evidence, and, indeed, reveal the main intention of these works. The English Mail-Coach, The Confessions of an English Opium Eater, and the Suspiria De Profundis are all discussed in considerable detail, and while considerations other than that of the principle of the sublime are included, this principle remains always the basic starting point. From an analysis of the workings of the sublime principle in De Quincey's writing, a new kind of unity becomes apparent in his work, a unity of symbols and images, of mood and emotion. An awareness of this special kind of unity contributes to an understanding of a writer who seems, on many occasions, to be discontinuous, erratic and wildly mistaken. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This thesis attempts to reconcile a feminist with a contextualist approach. It enquires into the historical origins of the emergence of women as writers in the seventeenth century. At the same time, it places this women's movement in the context of a profoundly complex revolution in thought, thereby discovering that women's intellectual contributions to the destruction of the hierarchical world view and to the search for new, just alternatives were as diverse and as problematic as men's were. The women who wrote in the seventeenth century were all preoccupied, implicitly or explicitly, with the question: By what authority do I cast off the traditional silence of women and dare to speak out? They gave different answers. Part One uses the lives of Gertrude More and Mary Ward to illustrate the subtle ways in which the Catholic Church's concept of grace required the submission of women despite their conflicting inner voices. In contrast, Part Two explores the challenge of the seventeenth-century chariasmatic movement to the traditional notion of grace. The radical female Protestants made a significant step towards modern feminism both because they appealed to their own experience as a source for truth and because they initiated an autobiographical form which dramatizes the convinced woman in revolt against patriarchal structures. Part Three demonstrates that, despite the decline in the authority of the prophet's experience which came with the trliumph of the perspective and methods of science, Jane Lead's writings continued a mystical counter-tradition which would nourish the Romantic alternative to scientific reductionism. Part IV analyzes the views of Margaret Cavendish and Aphra Behn who argued the natural right of a woman to write. Both challenged neoclassical aesthetic ideals--Cavendish by writing to delight herself, Behn by writing to delight her audience. Part V concludes by contrasting the approaches of two women who appealed to the authority of rational argument to justify their views. Mary Astell emerges as an early theorist for enlightenment feminism, Anne Conway as a theorist for holistic feminism. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This dissertation contributes to IS research by explaining user intentions while using AR features in mobile social networking and retail app contexts. It consists of three essays, which use partial least squares modeling to analyze different consumer behavior models. The first essay examines the influence of quality, human, and environmental factors on AR reuse intention in a mobile social networking context. The second essay introduces position relevance, a new construct essential to AR research in e-commerce, and it looks at the influence of this construct and app involvement on user purchase intention, while using view-in-room features on mobile retail apps. The third essay examines the influence of service quality and visual quality on recommendation intention of mobile retail apps while using view-in-room features compared to shopping without using these AR features.

Robots are becoming more common; robotics has gone from bleeding-edge technology to an everyday topic that families discuss around thedinner table.The number of robots in the industry is growing, which means thatthe demand and need for robots to understand the environment it isworking in is also growing.The standard method for a robot to gather information about a sceneinvolves moving to different pre-determined poses from which it canview and analyze the scene. However, this approach does not con-sider the topology of the scene that the robot should explore.This thesis aims to create a two-dimensional approach to determinethe next best view ( 2D-NBV) to view and explore the scene, intro-duced in the method section.The 2D-NBV method converts a point cloud of the scene to an ele-vation map. A segmenting network is used to get the positions ofpre-trained objects. The positions are then used to generate a2DGaussian kernel heatmap of the scene. Using the 2D elevation andGaussian map, the NBV pose is then calculated. The NBV pose isthen converted back to a 6D pose that the robot moves to capture anew point cloud and register it to the scene.The 2D-NBV method is compared to a baseline and a state-of-the-artmethod. The baseline method captures four different point cloudsfrom pre-determined positions and registers them together. The state-of-the-art methods find a point of interest and declare a set of viewcandidates on a sphere around the point. Ray casting is used to findthe pose with the highest information gain. This pose is set as theNBV for the robot to move to. The goal of this thesis is that themethod should perform better than the baseline method, describedfurther in the method section.The evaluation metric used in this thesis is how wellthe differentmethods could estimate the bounding boxes of pre-trained items us-ing an off-the-shelf semantic scene segmentation method. Six sceneswith varying difficulty were constructed to test the methods.The results showed that the 2D-NBV method successfully comple-mented the scene with information about its empty cells. The 2D-NBV outperforms the state-of-the-art on occluded scenes. The 2D-NBV performed overall just as well as the baseline. The reason thatthe 2D-NBV did not outperform the baseline is seen as a consequenceof the information loss going from 3D to 2D.

The field of Computer Vision continues to be revolutionized by advances in Convolutional Neural Networks. These networks are well suited for the regular grid structure of image data. However, there are many irregular image types that do not fit within such a framework, such as multi-view images, spherical images, superpixel representations, and texture maps for 3D meshes. These kinds of representations usually have specially designed networks that only operate and train on that unique form of data, thus requiring large datasets for each data domain. This dissertation aims to bridge the gap between standard convolutional networks and specialized ones. It proposes selection-based convolution. This technique operates on graph representations, giving it the flexibility to represent many irregular image domains, but maintains the spatially-oriented nature of an image convolution. Thus, it is possible to train a network on standard images, then use those same network weights for any kind graph-based representation. The effectiveness of this technique is evaluated on image types such as spherical images and 3D meshes for tasks such as segmentation and style transfer. Improvements to the selection mechanism through various forms of interpolation are also presented. Finally, this work demonstrates the generality of selection and its ability to be applied to various forms of graph networks and graph data, not just those specific to the image domain.

Studiens syfte var att ta del av förskollärares tankar kring relationen mellan materialitet och agens såsom det kommer till uttryck när de utformar den fysiska miljön inomhus utifrån barns lek. Vi utgår från ett onto-epistemologiskt perspektiv och studien bygger på en fenomenografisk metodansats. Sex verksamma förskollärare intervjuades och är den empirin som studien bygger på. Resultatet visade på fem teman som beskriver hur förskollärare utformar inomhusmiljön utefter barnens intressen och behov. Dessa var Barnens agens i leken, Miljö och materials agens, Barnens agens i miljön, Miljö utefter barnens intressen och Barnens bästa. Inom dessa teman kunde vi urskilja olika variationer i förskollärarnas berättelser. Slutsatsen syftar till hur förskollärares förhållningssätt och barnsyn är nära kopplat med hur de beskriver att de ordnar och utformar sina fysiska inomhusmiljöer. Studien bidrar med reflekterande frågor och tankar om hur barn synliggörs som aktiva agenter i förskollärares beskrivningar av sina inomhusmiljöer. Den bidrar även till förståelsen kring hur materialitet och agens påverkas och påverkar varandra. / The purpose of the study was to take part in preschool teachers' thoughts on the relationship between materiality and agency as it’s expressed when they design the physical environment indoors based on children's play. The study is based on an onto-epistemological perspective and with a phenomenographic methodological approach. Six active preschool teachers were interviewed and the empirical evidence is what the study is based on. The results showed five themes that describe how preschool teachers design the indoor environment according to the children's interests and needs. These were The children's agency in play, The environment and materials' agency, The children's agency in the environment, The environment according to the children's interests and The children's best interests. Within these themes, we were able to distinguish different variations in the preschool teachers' stories. The conclusion refers to how preschool teachers' attitudes and views of children are closely linked to how they describe that they arrange and design their physical indoor environments. The study contributes with reflective questions and thoughts about how children are made visible as active agents in preschool teachers' descriptions of their indoor environments. It also contributes to the understanding of how materiality and agency are affected and affect each other.

Even though the topic of gender is ever more present, as confirmed by the large amount of popular scientific literature on the topic, well-informed scientific papers on the topic of relationship between gender and conflicts within the environment of teaching staff are lacking both in domestic and foreign literature. The impetus for the creation of this thesis was the contemplation of the idea of how a larger proportion of males within teaching staff would influence the feminized Czech education system. The thesis investigates whether the gender makeup of teaching staff of selected kindergartens influences the types of conflicts that arise and how their characteristics depend on the gender makeup. The first chapter defines the notion of conflict from a theoretical point of view based on published literature and enquires into their causes and sources, as well as approaches to solutions. The second chapter deals with the notion of gender and presents current approaches and attitudes to this issue. In the second part of this chapter, we present several views on the difference between the male and female brain, perception, ways of thinking and assessment of sensory input, male and female communication and differing approaches to conflicts. The third chapter elucidates the function, core business and...