For eight years, since I began my research, my main concern has been to understand children and their world. The first step towards understanding how children think was taken in connection with my thesis, which I presented five years ago.This was a description of how children in the age group three to eight years conceive their own learning. The thesis was published in the same series as the present monograph and is entitled "The child''s conception of learning". The main emphasis in this study was on developmental psychology. As I have worked as a preschool teacher myself, I am extremely anxious that my research will be of benefit to my former colleagues. I have therefore devoted a great deal of time to writing and collaborating in numerous books of popular science. These have always been based on my own research. Now, however, the time is ripe for taking a new step, based on new research, towards understanding children and helping others to understand them., this time by publishing "Learning to learn", which is a description of how children have actually been taught to learn in preschool. In this type of study it is not a question of first obtaining results of the nature of basic research and then applying them in the educational setting, but both aspects are integrated in that the starting-point is the phenomena that are of importance to children in their everyday life.
