This paper reports on a study conducted within VIDEO-LM (Viewing, Investigating and Discussing Environments of Learning Mathematics), a video-based professional development project for secondary mathematics teachers that aims to enhance reflection on practice. The study explored VIDEO-LM sessions where Israeli teachers watched an 8th grade…

Abundant research has tried to understand how games can be designed and used effectively to improve the learning process and to examine the correlations between digital learning games and student motivation, engagement, and knowledge retention. The current study examined the correlation between learning through digital game-based learning (DGBL)…

Troubleshooting activities require students to diagnose teacher-crafted erroneous examples by detecting and explaining the conceptual errors driving them. In a previous study, the author tested whether diagnosing erroneous examples and then scoring them using a rubric that contained the related worked examples, a step-by-step strategy to solve a…

This article describes a unique ongoing experience of learning programming via engagement in music programming of known melodies. Seventh and eighth graders participated in 10 lessons of weekly activity. Via the programming of melodies, using the Scratch 2.0 environment, they became acquainted with basic concepts of programming such as methods,…

The goal of this research is to provide a rich set of connections between two fields: (i) Nanoscale science and technology (NST) and (ii) topics from a common middle school physics curriculum. NST is emerging as one of the most promising new fields of the 21st century, which is one of the many arguments for including NST topics in secondary…

The OECD Future of Education and Skills 2030 (E2030) project's overall goal is that of looking to the future in terms of how school curricula should evolve given the technological advances and other changes that societies are now facing. Towards that end, the E2030 project centres on the idea that education needs to equip students with the…

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…

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…

The study examined how student control over metacognitive prompts in a multimedia environment affects students' ability to solve mathematical problems in immediate comprehension tasks using a multimedia program and a delayed-transfer test. It also examined the effect on metacognitive discourse, mental effort, and engagement with multimedia-based…

The aim of the present study is to explore the effects of Meta-strategic Knowledge (MSK) on scientific inquiry learning. MSK is a subcomponent of metacognition defined as general, explicit knowledge about thinking strategies. Following earlier studies that showed considerable effects of explicit instruction of MSK regarding the strategy of…

Closing educational gaps between sub-populations in Israel, particularly between students in Hebrew-speaking and Arabic-speaking schools, persists to be one of the priorities of Israel's education system. In the field of information and communication technology (ICT), this goal refers to infrastructure as well as practice, i.e. teaching and…

The paper examines the implementation of an external written curriculum in the classroom. The study is based on observation of and interviews with 26 Israeli Bible teachers who followed a formal curriculum and used a teachers' guide. The study identified three types of curriculum narrative: the frame narrative, the task narrative, and the…

Although many researchers have examined knowledge building in traditional settings and distance learning, few have examined middle school students' building of mathematical knowledge using mobile phones. The present study uses two well-known models of knowledge building to carry out the examination: the interactive analysis model of knowledge…

Students' mathematical lives are characterized not only by a set of mathematical ideas and the engagement in mathematical thinking, but also by social relations, specifically, relations of authority. Watching student actions and speaking to students, one becomes cognizant of a "web of authority" ever present in mathematics classrooms. In…

This paper compares the way lessons on systems of linear equations unfold in a classroom in the Negev region of Israel with the way they unfold in a Shanghai and Hong Kong classroom. Lessons are viewed as temporal entities describable not only by the nexus of topics they contain but also by how they flow in time. In this light, the lessons in the…