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effectiveness and where it was also much more difficult to use individuallyreferencedwork methods.Based on the ambiton to acquire deeper kowledge of pre-school and of the workactually carried out there, the central problems of this dissertation were in brief:- What are the notions of pre-school and what are the conceptions of work, playand learning held by professionally active pre-school teachers?- How do pre-school teachers act in groups of children with reference to thesenotions and conceptions?- What are the notions of pre-school and what are the conceptions of work, playand learning held by trainee teachers at the beginning and at the end of their preschoolteacher training?"Notion" is a key word in this study. Notions can be defined as structuring andintegrating, comprehensive principles determining how an individual interprets andvalues the surrounding world. They include various kinds of knowledge andassumptions about the surrounding world and they are of a more basic andprofound nature than values and attitudes. Notions can be regarded as moreabstract, general and permanent than values and attitudes. They are formed andestablished on the basis of people's conceptual and material circumstances.Different individuals have different basic experiences, which means that they canhave different notions of the same phenomenon."Conception" is another key word in this study. The most important differencebetween notions and conceptions is that conceptions are of a more limited anddescriptive nature, and that they are more directly connected with the empiricaldata, with the individual's statements. Notions express a more general andexplanatory pattern of ideas and interpretations. Notions and conceptions of acertain phenomenon also include readiness to take action regarding to thisphenomenon.In this study, notions and conceptions are examined through interview analyses.The interviews with a group of pre-school teachers and with a group of traineeteachers included a number of questions about pre-school and about work, play andleraning, e.g.: What is the most important function of pre-school in society? Whatis your opinion of the pre-school teachers' function regarding work? What is yourdefinition of the concept play? What is your opinion of the pre-school techers'function regarding play in pre-school? What should children learn in pre-school?What content should be prioritized by the pre-school teacher?In order to learn more how the pre-school teachers structure their work, aspecial classification item was designed and given in connection with theinterviews. The subjects were asked to classify a set of pictures of every daysitations in pre-school. Every picture showed children or adults and children. Twoclassifications were made. The first was made on the basis of the subjects' ownspontaneous structuring of the material. The second classification was made withthe instruction that the pictures should be classified as work, play or learning.This classification item was chosen as a verbally more independent complement tothe interview.184