School students' conceptual frameworks in astronomy and students' levels of knowledge and conceptualization were examined for 130 students in grades 2 through 12. Knowledge and conceptualization increased with school age. A test administered to 892 students in 7 schools demonstrated that schools contributed little to education in astronomy. (SLD)

In this study, the author elucidated whether reading experience continues to contribute to word recognition skills in readers with well-internalized reading skills. The participants performed consecutive same or different judgments regarding the identicalness of letters, words, and pseudohomophones. For a more detailed examination of how increased…

The study examined school functioning of Israeli Arab children with hearing impairment (HI) who were included in regular education classrooms, in comparison to their classmates with normal hearing (NH). Ninety-three children (60 NH and 33 HI), grades 1-6, participated. Teachers evaluated the children using the Arabic version of the Screening…

The relationship between language, thought, and concept formation has been a central issue in many studies and theoretical discussions in various domains--philosophy, psychology, anthropology, and linguistics. The relation between language and concept development can be framed as two opposing questions: (1) Does the child learn concepts first and…

Monolingual Hebrew-speaking subjects aged 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 11 years, as well as college students, were asked to interpret utterances consisting of two nouns and a verb in order to determine whether Hebrew speakers can rely on a word order strategy to assign sentence relation. (MP)

This study investigated the within-classroom uniformity of elementary students' perceptions of teachers' differential behavior, examining students at different achievement levels. Surveys indicated that achievement groups differed in perceptions of learning climate, negative reactions to teachers, and perceptions of teachers' differential behavior…

Israeli 2nd and 6th graders (n=159) working puzzles in task or ego goal conditions were more likely to request help and to explain help avoidance as motivated by effort toward independent mastery in the task-focus condition. Results clarify the role of motivational factors in academic help seeking. (SLD)

Three groups of sixth, eighth, and tenth graders took pre- and posttests on a Piagetian problem and a problem that evoked a misconception. Two intervention groups engaged in group transactions intended to create inter- and intrapersonal conflicts or took a multiple-choice test. Results indicated that treatment groups progressed on the Piagetian…

The ability of 378 elementary school students (aged 9-12 years) in Israel to extract "lawfulnesses" (invariants) from experience and to react to error by reexamining the problem and finding the error was studied on a self-paced inference task. Results are discussed in terms of postfailure reflectivity and postfailure impulsivity. (SLD)

This study set out to investigate the self-teaching of good and poor readers in pointed Hebrew--a highly regular orthography. Four groups of children (three groups in Grades 4 to 6, and one group in Grade 2) were included in this study; poor readers with large discrepancies between IQ and reading ("dyslexics"), IQ-nondiscrepant poor…

Advocates of school choice reform in education believe that when parents are granted the right to choose their child's school, they will act rationally, in a goal-oriented fashion, to maximize their educational utility by finding the "best" school for their children. The current qualitative study aims to examine these basic assumptions…

Pupils at an elementary school in Israel, their mothers, and their teachers were studied to determine how each group would attribute the causes of children's problem behavior. Pupils and teachers were apt to blame external factors. Parents tended to distribute responsibility for problems more evenly. (Author/PP)

If students are expected to become interested in science as a career or hobby, they must perceive their science courses as being useful. Student perceptions of usefulness of curricula were investigated relative to two agricultural programs taught in Israeli elementary and junior high schools. (PB)

Examines the effect of treatment on both the cognitive and the affective functioning of 142 low achievers. Results indicate significant gains for the experimental group on four variables (academic achievement, self-concept, social acceptance, and locus of control). Group therapy enhanced academic progress and social well-being of low-achieving…

This study examined how upper elementary biology students grasped the concepts of mean and deviation from mean and the implications of these concepts. Pretesting and posttesting of students who did and did not have computer assisted training in the concepts indicated that though most students failed in more difficult tasks, experimental students…