Do some forms of student (and school) assessment hinder the introduction of innovative educational practices and the development of innovation skills in education systems? This report focuses on the impact of high-stake summative assessment on innovation and argues that it is possible to reconcile high-stakes assessments and examinations through…

The first research question of this study concerns the plasticity of cognitive processes of adult learners confronted with the task of adapting to a new language and an unfamiliar system of formal education. The second question inquires into the relative contribution of two different forms of cognitive intervention--the Learning Potential…

Analogical reasoning--perceiving similarities in different situations and the transfer of such information--facilitates learning and understanding. However, children with learning disabilities (LD) typically demonstrate deficits in such information processing strategies. In this study, we investigated the analogical problem-solving differences…

The present study addressed two research questions: (a) the extent to which students who were exposed to meta-cognitive instruction are able to implement meta-cognitive processes in a delayed, stressful situation, in our case--being examined on the matriculation exam; and (b) whether students preparing themselves for the matriculation exam in…

Six experiments examined whether novelty versus familiarity influences global versus local processing styles. Novelty and familiarity were manipulated by either framing a task as new versus familiar or by asking participants to reflect upon novel versus familiar events prior to the task (i.e., procedural priming). In Experiments 1-3, global…

Functions are all around us, disguised as actions on concrete objects. Composition of functions, too, is all around us, because these actions can be performed in succession, the output of one serving as the input for the next. In terms of Gray and Tall's (2001) "embodied objects" or Lakoff and Nunez's (2000) "mathematical idea…

Why is it so challenging to provide pre-service teachers with adequate competence to cope with the complexity of the classroom context? Three key difficulties are frequently reported as reducing the effectiveness of teacher education programs: the construction of an integrated body of knowledge about teaching, the application of theories to…

The masked priming paradigm was used to examine the role of the root and verb pattern morphemes in lexical access within the verb system of Arabic. Three groups participated in the study: grade 6 dyslexics, a reading-level-matched group and grade 6 normal readers. The first group consisted of: 28 grade 6 reading disabled (RD) students, 8 girls and…

A sample of 196 participants (mean age 45.94 years, 54% women) completed inventories assessing upward and downward positive and negative social comparisons and general well-being. Widows and widowers were higher on upward negative comparisons than divorced or married persons while being lower on well-being measures of life satisfaction and…

This study investigates algebraic reasoning and self-regulation skills among elementary school teachers who participated in a professional development program either with IMPROVE metacognitive questioning (PD + Meta) or with no metacognitive guidance (PD). Sixty-four Israeli teachers participated in a 3-year program designed to enhance…

Children with mental retardation have pronounced difficulties in using cognitive strategies and comprehending abstract concepts--among them, the concept of sequential time (Van-Handel, Swaab, De-Vries, & Jongmans, 2007). The perception of sequential time is generally tested by using scenarios presenting a continuum of actions. The goal of this…

Compares American middle-class children, as representatives of heavy television viewers, and Israeli middle-class children, as representatives of lighter television viewers, to determine the extent to which accumulated television viewing enhances the development of particular mental skills. (PD)

Results of a study with 48 Israeli college students cast doubt on feature integration theory. Subjects searching for a probe in an array of three stimuli in two attention conditions, attention being manipulated by a dual-task requirement, made more conjunction errors than feature errors. (SLD)

This study describes the relationship between the instructor's feedback and students' metacognitive processes in an online course on democracy and multiculturalism, which was taught as part of a teacher education program. 700 postings, written by 68 students, were content analyzed along with 66 postings by the instructor, using tools designed for…

The effects of dissonant and consonant music on cognitive performance were examined. Situational dissonance and consonance were also tested and determined as the state where one's opinion is contrasted or matched with the majority's opinion, respectively. Subjects performed several cognitive tasks while listening to a melody arranged dissonantly,…