This case study examined the characteristics of classroom discourse during physics lessons in two single-sex high school classes--a boys' vs. a girls' class. All lessons were taught by the same teacher and covered the same topics. For each class, six lessons were recorded, transcribed, and coded and the characteristics of the discussion were…

Engagement in complex, challenging and multifaceted model-eliciting activities is considered helpful for preparing learners for everyday life. The current study seeks to trace the evolution of modelling routines during two model-eliciting activities. To identify how these routines emerged and evolved, we video-recorded a group of five prospective…

Sound is one of the most commonly used physical phenomena that most of us use without considering its nature. Moreover, students often face difficulties in understanding acoustic phenomena, the most frequent one of which is the substance-based view of sound instead of a process of pressure and density differences. The current study introduces…

Communal learning is a common paradigm for professional learning among teachers and teacher educators (TE). In this article, TE refers to faculty in institutions of higher education who train teachers. While the professional learning of teachers has been extensively studied, little is known about TEs' professional learning. This study contributes…

This article analyses two concepts that merge critical educational theory and practice: "photo-monologue" and "photo-dialogue," based on a workshop of Arab and Jewish students in Israel focused on family albums. The photo-monologue consists of a photograph and a quote by or in the name of a person seen in the photograph. The…

This study explores the complexities that are involved in the development of intercultural competence in music teacher education by examining the accounts of two music teacher educators from Finland and Israel who work extensively in culturally diverse contexts. A semi-structured interview method was used in conducting the interviews. Deardorff's…

One of the challenges of understanding the complexity of so-called reform mathematics instruction lies in the observational tools used to capture it. This article introduces a unique tool, drawing from commognitive theory, for describing classroom discussions. The Realization Tree Assessment tool provides an image of a classroom discussion,…

Today, conferences for academic communities can provide continuous active participation in lectures through an accompanying academic-professional discussion written into a document known as an Internet 'chat'. In this environment, participants are invited to react, ask questions, contribute knowledge, and form a learning community. This pioneer…

We examined the response of high school students in Israel to biographical texts. Students were exposed to three sub-genres of biographical texts (a literary-biographical text, an autobiographical text and a scientific-biographical text). These texts all differ from the conceptual schema of ordinary school texts. The data were collected from 64…

Student translators at the College of Language Sciences take a Media and Political Translation course in which they translate the latest news stories, media and political texts and terminology. This study proposes a model for integrating Gaza-Israeli war terminology and texts in translation instruction to familiarize the students with terminology…

This study aims to investigate and analyze the attitudes and opinions of computer science students at two academic colleges of education with regards to the use of structured and unstructured discussion forums in computer science courses conducted entirely online. Fifty-two students participated in two online courses. The students in each course…

Here I present 'stories of reading' as a model that takes account of the way an actual reader, together with other readers in a group, reacts to a text as part of an interpretive event. I demonstrate the model through the shared reading and discussion, by a non-academic group of Israeli women, of a Hebrew translation of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's…

The current study examines whether the engagement of mathematics teachers in modelling activities and subsequent changes in their conceptions about these activities affect their beliefs about mathematics. The sample comprised 52 mathematics teachers working in small groups in four modelling activities. The data were collected from teachers'…

This article explores children's perspectives on risk and protection in the context of war, exclusion, political conflict and immigration via the example of the excluded Ethiopian immigrant community in Israel. Thirty children of Ethiopian origin, aged four to six, shared their views on risk and protection with the aid of photography, drawings and…

This study compared students' learning in troubleshooting and problem solving activities. The troubleshooting activities provided students with solutions to conceptual problems in the form of refutation texts; namely, solutions that portray common misconceptions, refute them, and then present the accepted scientific ideas. They required students…