Search

Background: The study describes preschoolers' digital home environment, focusing on parent-child writing interactions using a smartphone and exploring its contribution to children's early literacy. Methods: Participants were 65 Israeli preschoolers (M = 62.37 months) from middle SES and one of their parents. Parents responded to questionnaires assessing the digital home environment (prevalence of digital devices, parental involvement in selecting digital content, children's independent digital activities and screen time). Parents were video recorded while assisting their children in writing a shopping list of three products using a smartphone (keyboard). We analysed how parents helped children segment words into their respective sounds (grapho-phonemic mediation) and type letters independently (printing mediation) and their reference to the orthography. Children's literacy skills (letter knowledge, phonological awareness and early writing) were assessed individually. Results: Findings showed that the homes are rich with technology and children are engaged daily with various digital devices. The level of parental involvement in selecting their children's digital content and the quality of their writing support positively related to children's early literacy skills. Children's independent digital activities were negatively related to their literacy skills. Hierarchical regression analyses showed that the nature of parental writing support predicted children's early literacy beyond parental involvement in selecting digital content and children's independent digital activities. Conclusions: The study reveals the benefits of parental involvement in their children's digital world and highlights the strength of parental writing support and the potential of parent-child digital activities in promoting children's early literacy.

This article discusses Israeli Bible teachers' perceptions of the 'otherness' and their actions in a reality in which teachers are required to balance the tension between being experts in the field of knowledge, coping with a state curriculum that promotes a faith-religious worldview, and acting as educators in promoting discourse dealing with social issues of inclusion, respect, and tolerance for the 'other'. The research is qualitative-interpretive, based on interviews with 13 teachers. It focuses on describing and explaining Bible teachers' perceptions and interpreting their actions. Findings point to two main perceptions: (1) A perception that transcends the boundaries of biblical academic discourse and fosters a moral dialogue of integration, tolerance, openness, and awareness of the 'other' as part of the Bible teacher's role. (2) A perception focused only on biblical discourse and refrains from dealing with issues of 'otherness' in the lesson. This research offers new tools and courses of action to implement these perceptions. Its conclusions may encourage teachers to develop pedagogical flexibility and an ability to navigate through issues of 'otherness' while responding to social, value, and moral issues that arise spontaneously in the multicultural dialogue in Bible lessons.

Educational discourses have embraced therapeutic discourse, a psychology-based system of assumptions about the self, its boundaries, development and social relations. While scholars have debated the virtues of this therapeutic turn, there has been little empirical study of therapeutic discourse in teacher pedagogical discourse. This article, using theoretical frameworks of teacher learning and the sociology of therapeutic discourse and employing linguistic ethnographic methods, features close analysis of therapeutic discourse in teacher workplace conversations. The focal case, in which a teacher consults with her colleagues regarding a non-compliant student, features four episodes of therapeutic reasoning (ETRs) in which various therapeutic logics are employed. Analysis uncovered three central manifestations of therapeutic discourse especially pertinent to education: the role of emotions; perceptions of the self; and temporality. Attending to these manifestations in each ETR reveals conditions under which they may enhance or impede potential for teacher learning and pedagogic action. When therapeutic modes of reasoning are deployed by teachers to discuss their problems of practice, they are found to be multifaceted, elastic, and to bear potential for agentive teacher action under certain conditions. This article calls for a more nuanced, temporally-sensitive perspective on therapeutic discourse in education, and addresses implications for theory and practice.

In recognition of growing economic inequality and rapid transformation in the world of work, we seek to understand how young people perceive their futures to develop career development education that supports both personal goals and promotes social and economic justice. Thirty-six students attending high-performing high schools in the United States (n = 19) and Israel (n = 17) were interviewed to assess their espoused future plans and conceptions of work and society. Consistent with the psychology of working theory, students' plans were reflective of the social, economic, national, and historical contexts in which they are embedded. US and Israeli students expressed optimism and anxieties about their futures, along with recognition of social and economic inequalities and limited motivation and awareness of how to effect social change. The findings are discussed with regard to implications for career development education and the promotion of social and economic justice.

A new educational paradigm, 'resilience education,' has emerged as an effort by states and local communities to provide their constituencies with skills to cope with natural and man-made disasters. While the topic of resilience has seen an explosion in academic and policy interest, little scholarly attention has been paid to exploring the social origins of resilience training. Drawing on the research tradition in history and sociology of knowledge and theorization of practices, this article explores the gradual establishment of the practice of resilience education in Israeli schools and changing assumptions about risks, coping and aims of education informing resilience initiatives in the educational system. Based on in-depth interviews with key figures in the professional field, I indicate the main tendencies in the local history of resilience training since the 1980s. These tendencies -- the normalization of insecurity, the incorporation of new programs within existing interventions, and the creation of a particular structure of training -- have interweaved the regular with the extreme, the expert with the lay, and the new with the old. I argue that such tendencies have become no less important for facilitating the establishment of resilience training than the scientific validity and practical effectiveness of this professional practice.

Research Findings: The study explored everyday parenting behaviors and their relations to parents' involvement in their children's digital activities during the COVID-19 lockdown, among Israeli Jewish and Arab parents of young children. We studied parents' behaviors through the prism of the Parenting Pentagon Model (PPM), which integrates five constructs of daily parenting behaviors that are beneficial for children's development: Partnership between the caretakers, Parental Leadership, Love Behaviors, Encouraging Independence, and Adherence to Rules. Participants, 487 parents (290 Jewish and 197 Arab) of children (2-to-8-years-old) answered questionnaires. Findings showed that both Jewish and Arab parents reported that Love behaviors were most frequent during the lockdown, followed by Leadership. Encouragement of Independence, adherence to Rules and Partnership were less frequent. Additionally, the more parents behaved beneficially in their daily life (according to PPM), the more they were involved in their child's digital activities, beyond family background (child's age, parent's education, and family's size). Practice or Policy: The results can assist in planning support programs for parents during times of crisis. Parental guidance regarding beneficial parenting and advantageous involvement in children's digital activities may be more helpful than restrictions and warnings regarding the risk of young children's exposure to digital activities and screens.

Purpose: Studies on reading in individuals with severe-to-profound hearing loss (deaf) raise the possibility that, due to deficient phonological coding, deaf individuals may rely more on orthographic-semantic links than on orthographic-phonological links. However, the relative contribution of phonological and semantic information to visual word recognition in deaf individuals was not directly assessed in these studies. The aim of the present study, therefore, was to examine the interplay between orthographic, phonological, and semantic representations during visual word recognition, in deaf versus hearing adults. Method: Deaf and hearing participants were asked to perform a visual lexical decision task in Hebrew. The critical stimuli consisted of three types of Hebrew words, which differ in terms of their relationship between orthography, phonology, and semantics: unambiguous words, homonyms, and homographs. Results: In the hearing group, phonological effects were more pronounced than semantic effects: Homographs (multiple pronunciations) were recognized significantly slower than homonyms or unambiguous words (one pronunciation). However, there was no significant difference between homonyms (multiple meanings) and unambiguous words (one meaning). In contrast, in the deaf group, there was no significant difference among the three word types, indicating that visual word recognition, in these participants, is driven primarily by orthography. Conclusion: While visual word recognition in hearing readers is accomplished mainly via orthographic-phonological connections, deaf readers rely mainly on orthographic-semantic connections.

This article discusses the occurrence of voids in the intersection between Hebrew and Israeli Sign Language (ISL). Using Weizman's classification of voids (2010, 2016) in our analysis, we have discovered that languages that employ visual and auditory modalities make use of an additional category of voids: modality-induced voids. Our corpus consists of assignments on voids that were given during an academic ISL interpreting program from 2014 to 2016. Students were asked to suggest voids that were found in a comparison of ISL and Hebrew. We validated the voids with ISL users, both Deaf people and hearing interpreters, and used an online ISL dictionary as an aid.

While the concept of resilience has attracted a great deal of academic interest, less attention has been paid to the particular traits of the resilient subject. This article extracts the prototype of the resilient student as performed through professional interventions that build resilience in Israeli schools in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Drawing on sociological scholarship that interweaves the domains of therapeutic discourse and cultural context, we describe the resilient subject not only as a psychological but also as cultural prototype and a national subject. We demonstrate that professional practices foster the ability to process feelings, think rationally and control instinctive emotional and bodily reactions to avoid violent behaviour. This ethics of non-violence draws on the western cultural ideal of a normative personality rather than on a particular political context. However the impact of professional interventions on the design of students' civil beliefs regarding the conflict might warrant consideration.

This article offers an ethnographic account of the professional activities of mental health practitioners, employed by the state's religious education system. I analyze various models implemented by practitioners for the purposes of preparing pupils for the state-mandated evacuation of Jewish settlers from Gaza and the West Bank. By focusing on the interaction between psychological and religious-national cultural frameworks I show how practitioners imbue familiar professional concepts with new meanings and create hybrid models of intervention.

The functional distinction between vision for perception and vision for action is well documented in the mature visual system. Ganel and colleagues recently provided direct evidence for this dissociation, showing that while visual processing for perception follows Weber's fundamental law of psychophysics, action violates this law. We tracked the developmental trajectory of this functional dissociation, asking whether the qualitatively different pattern observed in adults of adherence of perception but not of action to Weber's law would also be evident early in life. Children aged 5-8 and adults were asked to either estimate the size of discs (perception) or grasp discs (action) varying in diameter. Interestingly, variability of perceptual estimates increased as a function of object size in accord with Weber's law, while variability of grasping did not scale with object size, at all ages tested. This provides the first clear evidence for an early emergence of the dissociation between perception and action. (Contains 1 figure and 1 footnote.)

The present study evaluated the effect of a brief mindfulness-based preventive intervention on (a) dispositional (MAAS; Brown & Ryan, 2003) and state (SMS; Tanay & Bernstein, 2010) mindfulness; (b) putative proximal factors/processes engendered through the development of mindfulness, including increased decentering (EQ-D; Fresco et al., 2007) and reduced experiential avoidance (AAQ; Hayes et al., 2004); and (c) distal mood and anxiety vulnerability factors, including reduced depression-related dysfunctional attitudes, (DAS; de Graaf, Roelofs, & Huibers, 2009), anxiety sensitivity (ASI-3; Taylor et al., 2007), and negative affectivity (PANAS-NA; Watson, Clark, & Tellegen, 1988) among a university-community sample in Israel. Fifty-three adult participants between the ages of 20 and 52 (M[subscript age] = 25.2 years, SD[subscript age] = 4.3 years; 65.4% women) were recruited from the Haifa University community. Nineteen participants were randomly assigned to an experimental condition (M[subscript age] = 25.3 years, SD[subscript age] = 4.3 years; 66% women) and studied prospectively over the course of a four-session (21-day) mindfulness skills training intervention; and 34 participants were randomly assigned to a no-intervention (control) condition (M[subscript age] = 24.9 years, SD[subscript age] = 2.4 years; 64.7% women) and studied prospectively. Findings demonstrate statistically robust and clinically significant relations between mindfulness and the theorized proximal and distal mood and anxiety vulnerability factors. Findings are discussed with respect to their theoretical implications for better understanding mindfulness-psychopathology vulnerability relations, clinical implications for larger-scale universal and selective transdiagnostic prevention efforts, and future directions for this area of research. (Contains 3 tables and 1 figure.)

BackgroundAlthough chronic infections by typhoidal Salmonella are well-known, prolonged human infections by nontyphoidal Salmonella (NTS) are poorly characterized.MethodsWe retrospectively analyzed 48 345 culture-confirmed NTS infections that occurred in Israel 1995-2012. A case-control study was performed to identify risk factors associated with persistent infections. Whole-genome-sequencing, pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE), and a mouse infection model were used to study genetic and phenotypic differences between same-patient persistent, recurring isolates.ResultsIn total, 1047 cases of persistent NTS infections, comprising 2.2% of all reported cases of salmonellosis, were identified. The persistence periods ranged between 30 days to 8.3 years. The majority (93%) of the persistently infected patients were immunocompetent, and 65% were symptomatic with relapsing diarrhea, indicating a distinct clinical manifestation from the asymptomatic carriage of typhoidal Salmonella. Four NTS serovars (Mbandaka, Bredeney, Infantis and Virchow) were found to be significantly more frequently associated with persistence than others. Comparative genomics between early and later isolates obtained from the same patients confirmed clonal infection and showed 0 to 10 SNPs between persistent isolates. A different composition of mobile genetic elements (plasmids and phages) or amino acid substitutions in global regulators was identified in multiple cases. These changes resulted in differences in phenotype and virulence between early and later same-patient isolates.ConclusionsThese results illuminate the overlooked clinical manifestation of persistent salmonellosis that can serve as a human reservoir for NTS infections. Additionally, we demonstrate mechanisms of in-host microevolution and exhibit their potential to shape Salmonella pathogenicity, antimicrobial resistance and host-pathogen interactions.

Salmonella enterica is the leading etiologic agent of bacterial food-borne outbreaks worldwide. This ubiquitous species contains more than 2,600 serovars that may differ in their host specificity, clinical manifestations, and epidemiology. To characterize salmonellosis epidemiology in Israel and to study the association of nontyphoidal Salmonella (NTS) serovars with invasive infections, 48,345 Salmonella cases reported and serotyped at the National Salmonella Reference Center between 1995 and 2012 were analyzed. A quasi-Poisson regression was used to identify irregular clusters of illness, and pulsed-field gel electrophoresis in conjunction with whole-genome sequencing was applied to molecularly characterize strains of interest. Three hundred twenty-nine human salmonellosis clusters were identified, representing an annual average of 23 (95% confidence interval [CI], 20 to 26) potential outbreaks. We show that the previously unsequenced S. enterica serovar 9,12:l,v:- belongs to the B clade of Salmonella enterica subspecies enterica, and we show its frequent association with extraintestinal infections, compared to other NTS serovars. Furthermore, we identified the dissemination of two prevalent Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium DT104 clones in Israel, which are genetically distinct from other global DT104 isolates. Accumulatively, these findings indicate a severe underreporting of Salmonella outbreaks in Israel and provide insights into the epidemiology and genomics of prevalent serovars, responsible for recurring illness.

In 2011, the American Congress passed the Wolf Amendment, which prohibits NASA from collaborating with China and organizations identified with China on space research. However, as shown in this paper, information collected by NASA and the Israeli Space Agency could reach China indirectly through the United Arab Emirates, which collaborates with both the United States, Israel, and China. Could collaboration with the UAE on space research put Israel at risk and lead to friction with the US (for example, in a situation where Israeli technology passes from the UAE to China), or could the UAE precedent pave the way for broader collaborations in the field of space that could create new opportunities for Israel? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Relations between China and Israel have expanded dramatically in recent years, especially in the economic field. Chinese economic entities have increased their investments in Israeli companies, particularly in hi-tech. Chinese companies engaged in infrastructure have successfully won tenders in Israel, and the Chinese government has invited Israel to take part in two major Chinese initiatives -- the One Belt, One Road initiative and the Asian Investment and Infrastructure Bank. This essay looks at the opportunities and challenges Israel must weigh in consideration of its overall relations with China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how non-citizen minorities experience military service, focusing on children of international labor migrants who served in the Israel Defense Forces. During the 1990’s, Israel witnessed an influx of migrant workers, primarily from the Philippines, Latin America and Africa. However, due to Israeli immigration policies, neither they nor their Israeli-born children were eligible for citizenship. Consequently, upon reaching the age of 18, unlike their Israeli peers, these children were not recruited into the army. Furthermore, they lived under constant threat of deportation. Due to advocacy by civil society organizations, in 2006 and 2010 the government granted civic status (permanent residency) to approximately 1,500 children. This made them eligible for military service, a somewhat unique situation globally. Upon completion of their first year of military service, they were eligible for Israeli citizenship and their immediate family members were eligible for permanent residency. Through qualitative and quantitative research, we examine inclusion and belonging amongst children of migrant workers who served in the military. Our findings suggest that military service enabled them to overcome the exclusionary boundaries they experienced as children in three ways. Firstly, they achieved formal belonging by receiving citizenship. Secondly, they achieved informal belonging through the cultural and social capital this service accrued within Israeli society. Finally, for some, military service deepened their knowledge of Judaism and, in certain cases, led to conversion, thus fostering religious belonging. These three aspects facilitated inclusion and a sense of belonging for these formerly marginalized children while also enhancing their legitimacy within Israeli society. This unique case study contributes to ongoing global debates about the experiences of minority groups in the military.

This 2-year cross-sectional evaluation of nontuberculous mycobacterial (NTM) infections involved all Israeli medical centers that treat cystic fibrosis patients. The study comprised 186 patients whose sputum was analyzed for NTM. The prevalence of NTM isolates was 22.6%, and 6.5% and 10.8% of the patients fulfilled the 1997 and 2007 American Thoracic Society criteria for NTM lung disease, respectively. Mycobacterium simiae (40.5%), M. abscessus (31.0%), and M. avium complex (14.3%) were the most prevalent. Presence of Aspergillus spp. in sputum and the number of sputum specimens processed for mycobacteria were the most significant predictors for isolation of NTM (odds ratio [OR] = 5.14, 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.87–14.11 and OR = 1.47, 95% CI 1.17–1.85, respectively). The incidence of NTM pulmonary infections is increasing among cystic fibrosis patients, reflecting the increase in longevity of such patients as well as environmental exposure to various species of mycobacteria.

We investigated the association between prescribing antimicrobial agents and antimicrobial resistance of Streptococcus pneumoniae among children with acute otitis media in southern Israel. During a 6-year period, all prescriptions of a sample of ≈20% of Jewish and Bedouin children

A neonatal intensive care unit outbreak was caused by a strain of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus previously found in the community (ST45-MRSA-IV). Fifteen infected neonates were identified, 2 of whom died. This outbreak illustrates how a rare community pathogen can rapidly spread through nosocomial transmission.

Listeria monocytogenes, an uncommon foodborne pathogen, is increasingly recognized as a cause of life-threatening disease. A marked increase in reported cases of listeriosis during 1998 motivated a retrospective nationwide survey of the infection in Israel. From 1995 to 1999, 161 cases were identified; 70 (43%) were perinatal infections, with a fetal mortality rate of 45%. Most (74%) of the 91 nonperinatal infections involved immunocompromised patients with malignancies, chronic liver disease, chronic renal failure, or diabetes mellitus. The common clinical syndromes in these patients were primary bacteremia (47%) and meningitis (28%). The crude case-fatality rate in this group was 38%, with a higher death rate in immunocompromised patients.

We examined prospectively the outcome of primary and nonprimary maternal cytomegalovirus (CMV) infection during pregnancy among 88 and 120 women, respectively. The risk for vertical transmission was 1.83× higher for primary infection than for nonprimary infection. Nonetheless, congenital CMV disease was diagnosed in both infection groups at similar rates.