The current study attempted to investigate the development of Arabic academic vocabulary knowledge among middle-school Arabic native speakers, taking into account the socioeconomic status of the Arab population in Israel. For this purpose, Arabic academic word list was developed, mapping the required academic words that are needed for adequate…

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…

I examined the impact of a self-diagnosis activity on students' conceptual understanding and achievements in physics. This activity requires students to self-diagnose their solutions to problems that they have solved on their own--namely, to identify and explain their errors--and self-score them--that is, assign scores to their solutions--aided by…

Purpose: Resource allocation is a key policy instrument that affects the educational achievement distribution (EAD). The literature on methods of allocation is focused mainly on equity issues. The purpose of this paper is to develop a composite funding formula, which adds to the equity-based element (i.e. a needs-based element compensating for…

Classroom disciplinary climate and its correlation to students' performance is a widely debated issue. Policy reports tend to assume that classroom disruptions interfere with the learning experience. Empirical evidence for this assumption, however, which carefully distinguishes classroom climate from the school climate in general, is still…

The "world culture" framework posits a convergence in the organisation of education across the world. On the other hand, scholars observing teaching practices inside classrooms find significant variation among nations and regions of the world. This study examined the global change patterns of classroom practices at the between- and…

This is the first study examining the association between victimization by bullying and attachment to both parents and teachers among students who report Learning Disorders (LD) and/or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). A total of 1,691 seventh- and eighth-grade students in six junior high schools completed questionnaires about…

The goal of the research was to examine executive functioning and figurative language comprehension among students with learning disabilities as compared to students without learning disabilities. As part of the research, we examined 20 students with learning disabilities and 21 students with no learning disabilities, both groups of students…

This study examined the contribution of maternal bonding to the adjustment of Israeli adolescents following the 2006 Lebanon War. In all, 2,858 seventh and eighth graders who lived in areas that were exposed to missile attacks completed the Parental Bonding Instrument (assessing maternal care and control) and questionnaires evaluating…

Threshold concepts are essential ideas about the natural world that present either a barrier or a gateway to a deep understanding of science. Weight, mass, and gravity are threshold concepts that underpin students' abilities to understand important ideas in all fields of science, embodied in the performance expectations in the Next Generation…

Most existing research indicates that working students perform more poorly than do full-time students on standardized achievement tests. However, we know there are wide international variations in this gap. This article shows that national and international contexts help to explain the gap in the academic performance between working and nonworking…

The purpose of this study is to examine how the quality of teaching contributes to a sense of belonging and satisfaction, while considering students' personal and socioeconomic variables, in explaining the risk of dropping out of school. Two thousand, eight hundred and seventy 4th- to 9th-grade students from 105 classes in 18 schools participated…

Values, or the guiding standards of adolescents' lives, influence which behaviors are considered more justified than others. The relationship between values and social behavior has been established across many studies including the relationship of values and aggression. But only a few studies have examined these relationships among youth.…

Continuing motivation for science learning may be manifested through engagement in extracurricular science-related activities, which are not the result of school or other external requirements. Very few articles have appeared in the last decade on this important aspect of science learning. This article presents a survey based on seven Likert-type…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the potential contribution of decoding efficiency to the development of reading comprehension among skilled adult native Arabic speakers. In addition, we tried to investigate the influence of Arabic vowels on reading accuracy, reading speed, and therefore to reading comprehension. Seventy-five Arabic…