The Swedish Basic Skills in a Long Term Perspective research project, which is described in this paper, was prompted by the belief that only a long-term perspective could reveal significant changes in schools and society at large. The general purpose of the described project is to endeavor, in historical and societal terms, to elucidate and…

During a longitudinal in-depth study of the reading acquisition and cognitive and visual development of four children with cerebral visual impairment, the children's visual acuity improved, but their full-scale IQs declined, mostly because of difficulties in abstract thinking, visual cognitive organization, and extremely low processing speed. The…

A study of the native language literacy of Finnish immigrant children in Sweden had as subjects the 81 Finnish immigrant pupils in grades 3-6 of a Swedish industrial city. At the time of the study, about 20 percent attended Finnish-medium classes, 34 percent attended Swedish-medium classes, and about 46 percent attended bilingual classes. Native…

The six articles in this journal deal with various aspects of early reading. The topics covered are: a preschool biliteracy project; early reading as language development; the techniques used in teaching children with normal hearing, hearing impaired children, and deaf children to read; preschool reading and speaking acquisition in two languages;…

Four cities in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark have been engaged since 1977 in a joint study of the junior level of elementary school. (More than 5,000 pupils are involved in the study.) The Department of Education at the University of Turku joined the project in the autumn term of 1979. The purpose of the Swedish project, reported here, was to…

About 2,200 immigrant children in Sweden were studied by means of tests and teacher questionnaires. The children, representing 36 nationalities, were born outside Sweden and were distributed over the nine grades of the Swedish Comprehensive School. Various functional language skills in Swedish as a second language (L2), nonverbal intelligence and…

Intended to provide an outlet for systematic and substantive reviews, both empirical and theoretical, and for extended integrative reports of programatic research, this volume focuses on the nature of reading and reading disabilities, with implications for both theory and practice. The first chapter of the book reports on a long-term study of the…

The International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) was a collaborative effort by seven governments and three intergovernmental organizations to describe and compare the literacy skills of people from Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United States. Each country drew a probability sample from which results…