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The importance of engaging students with complex societal challenges has led to the adoption of various interdisciplinary teaching and learning practices in both K-12 and higher education. However, interdisciplinary learning is one of the most complex domains of contemporary educational practice, and, despite its significance, remains significantly undertheorized and under-researched. This Special Issue highlights empirical research efforts toward understanding interdisciplinary learning in its complexity. It simultaneously aims to (1) advance ecological perspectives that encompass concepts and methodologies for studying complex heterogeneous learning practices and (2) apply these perspectives to the research of interdisciplinary learning - of how people learn across and beyond disciplines. This introduction provides a historical context for interdisciplinary learning, introduces an ecological stance toward researching learning across and beyond disciplines, and reviews critical theoretical and methodological challenges within interdisciplinary learning, arguing that the field of the learning sciences is well-positioned to address these challenges. It discusses how the contributions presented in this special issue shed light on theoretical, methodological, empirical, and design aspects of interdisciplinary learning and offer a basis for further design work and research.

There is a crisis of many years in Israel in the subject of mathematics learning. In the last PISA tests, conducted by the OECD during the last ten years, Israel is placed 39-41 among all the countries participated the research. It was also found that all the years Israel "won" to be one of the first three countries with the highest grade distribution among all the countries and economic entities participating in general and among OECD countries in particular. In addition, it was found that rate of Israeli students who fail the mathematics test is one of the highest in the organization countries. The goal of this research is comparing students' achievements in the Israeli education system and in the Finnish education system, which is considered a system with excellent achievements in mathematics and low-grade distribution rate in general and in mathematics grades in particular. This comparison is aimed to identify the Israeli education system's problems and learn the lessons to improve it. This article discusses the question what is the main success factor in mathematics in Israel compared to Finland according to the 2015 PISA test results and what can be learned from this difference? In this paper I have based on my research findings in which I analyzed the correlation between the PISA questionnaires and student achievement in mathematics. [This paper was presented at the TDID Doctoral Students' Conference, 14-16 May 2020.]

Meaning-making in teaching-learning mathematical processes is a relevant issue analysed through different philosophical and educational frames. In particular, the use of digital tools in mathematics education affects the meaning-making processes. This paper discusses meaning-making from a phenomenological standpoint, in which interpretative activities are relevant. This approach requires a careful analysis of the semiotic resources' evolution, including those related to the used digital tools. The paper aims to introduce an analytical tool, the Timeline. This tool is an elaboration on previous analysis tools, like the interaction flowchart and the semiotic bundle. Such a tool allows the analysis of relationship among interactions, semiotic resources, and meaning-making. In this paper, the Timeline is used to analyze two episodes from two different learning experiments where GeoGebra and augmented reality are used. High school students from Italy and Israel participated in this study. Video recording has been used to document the entire learning experiments. The analysis provides evidence that the Timeline enables investigating the relationship between students-teacher-artifacts interactions and meaning-making. Moreover, results may give teachers ideas for using digital tools to foster students' meaning-making.

This paper tells a story of Israeli male high schoolers who spend their adolescent years preparing for service in elite military units in the Israeli Defense Force (IDF). They dream of serving in special units and begin training at 15 or 16 years old. After years of taxing preparations, at the age of 17 they arrive at the grueling military exams. They are at their peak -- potent and energized, motivated, and in the best shape of their lives. Yet most high schoolers return from the examinations psychologically broken. Having imagined their future selves as virile commandos, they return humiliated for cowering during the tough assignments. The paper draws on interviews with 40 adults who failed the exams 10 to 15 years after the event. Using Bourdieu's theory of symbolic violence, it shows that youthful failure at 17 continues to send debilitating messages for years after the event. Those who fail continually tell themselves that they are not worthy, not good enough, that they do not have enough character or strength. Consequently, they abandon possible life trajectories and possible selves. They surrender to the exam, and then remain prisoners of a cultural ethos they have failed to embody.

The present paper inquires whether a meticulous program designed to resolve Interdisciplinary Societal Dilemmas through dialogic argumentation advances epistemic practices. To delineate how epistemic practices are manifested in classroom discussions, we adopted the Actor-Network Theory (ANT), which explores the interactions and agencies of human and non-human actors. ANT analyses uncover the power these actors exert on each other and help recognize the networks that these actors create or dissolve. They also delineate how epistemic practices emerge and are shaped in these networks. We identified four epistemic practices in the discussions: (1) taking a reasoned position, (2) integrating knowledge from different disciplines, (3) weighing pros and cons before taking a complex position, and (4) role-playing in a democratic game. We show that the type of discourse developed in the program was mostly dialogic argumentation. In addition, we demonstrate how teachers often inhibit these advancements. Indeed, in the case of integrating knowledge from different disciplines, teachers' role is central, but the emerged actors' network is often nondialogic. Moreover, we show how non-human actors shape the interactions in networks as well as the formation of knowledge and agency. We conclude that: (a) the design of activities for resolving interdisciplinary societal dilemmas provides many opportunities for advancing epistemic practices, (b) these practices are mostly advanced through dialogic argumentation, but (c) more efforts should be invested in affording interdisciplinary argumentation.

To increase the prosperity of nation states and the availability of skilled labour for the global economy, many countries have encouraged students with low socio-economic status (SES) and minorities to enrol in colleges and universities. In Israel, a significant effort was made starting in 1995 to create more colleges and to provide more access to higher education for students within the mentioned groups. Yet the question arises concerning what was achieved by this effort. This paper analyses the relationship between (i) wealth and higher education in population clusters, (ii) higher education and geographical areas, and (iii) higher education and ethnic subsets in Israel. The evidence indicates a strong correlation between the SES of a locality and the number of students per residents in that locality. This correlation, however, is affected by the existence of an affordable local college. After the correlations are presented and explained, recommendations for enabling low-SES students to be successful in higher education are explored, including developing a new curriculum for middle and secondary students, creating transitional 'discourse communities' for first-year college students from low-SES, and investing in local colleges in Israel.

Background: This paper explores K-12 interdisciplinary learning in the humanities (IL-Humanities), an area that, until now, has seen limited research focus compared to its STEM counterparts. We asked: (1) What are the outcomes of IL-Humanities in terms of interdisciplinary competences? (2) How do learners in these environments engage in cross-disciplinary knowledge building and transdisciplinary identity work? Methods: We assessed the efficacy of IL-Humanities across ten Israeli middle schools through a pre-post intervention/comparison design, utilizing the novel Interdisciplinary Competences Assessment (ICA). Qualitative insights into the learning processes within classrooms were derived using discourse analysis methods. Findings: Students' interdisciplinary competences were found to increase following the IL-Humanities interventions. Qualitative analyses offered "thick descriptions" of the process: Students leveraged cross-disciplinary transfer of knowledge to deepen their understanding of complex phenomena and used personal narratives to engage in identity work. Contribution: This study enhances interdisciplinary education research by: (1) providing and operationalizing a model of interdisciplinary competences as an assessment tool; (2) demonstrating the effectiveness of IL-Humanities environments in developing these competences; and (3) advancing our understanding of learners' engagement with cross-disciplinary knowledge building and transdisciplinary identity work.

By investigating the first thirty minutes of ten initial student group meetings (cf. Rampazzo & Aranha, 2019), this study explores the interactional resources that participants display during online talk-ininteraction. Multimodal Conversation Analysis is applied to the data consisting of "Gesprächsanalytisches Transkriptionssystem 2" (GAT2) transcriptions of recorded Zoom video conferences. Virtual Exchange (VE), also referred to as Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL), is a method of intercultural online learning in which groups of learners collaborate with partners from another culture or geographical area in an authentic and immersive setting. Despite the collaborative and immersive nature of virtual exchanges, microanalytic studies regarding interaction in this field are still underrepresented (Dooly, 2017). This is also and particularly true for the concept of interactional competence (IC) (Kramsch, 1986) which has hardly been considered in VE research so far. IC is a competence model that comprises interlocutors' interactional resources such as turn-taking, repair, sequence-organization, multimodal resources and other. This paper depicts the interactional strategies that EFL students adopt in online video team meetings. Further, it argues that some L2 IC features, such as turn-taking and multilingual resources, come with particular dynamics and characteristics in a VE context and provides examples for these practices.

One-to-one laptop initiatives have become prevalent in schools aiming to enhance active learning and assist students in developing twenty-first-century skills. This paper reports on a qualitative investigation of teachers in a junior high school in Northern Israel, who were gradually implementing one-to-one computing. The research reported in this paper is based on longitudinal data collected over a five-year period and included all of the teachers who participated in the project. We triangulated teachers' perspectives and actual behavior by employing classroom observations, followed up with semi-structured interviews. This study aims to map teachers' perspectives on changes in teaching in one-to-one computing settings, and the pedagogical strategies that they use in one-to-one classrooms. To explore the depth of change in teaching, teachers' perspectives were mapped based on the SAMR framework, while the TEUCT-TEUIT approach was employed to categorize pedagogical strategies. The findings pointed to several benefits of using a laptop for teaching, as well as classroom management problems and technological problems while teaching. Analysis of the interviews revealed four categories which appeared in the original TEUCT/ TEUCT scales, alongside three additional categories which did not appear in the original scales, and emerged bottom-up from our data. Furthermore, findings indicated that some of the categories originally included in TEUCT, should rather be included in the TEUIT scale. The findings point to a change in teaching strategies, from a more teacher-centered teaching approach to a more student-centered learning approach.

As a contribution to the efforts to understand the influence of peer presence on self-regulated learning, this paper studies students' reaction to a project-based activity, the final product of which was a scientific communication to peers. In this activity, "peer lecturing," the students formulate a question on a topic linked to the course, search scientific information in order to answer the question, and teach the result of their investigations to their class in the form of a whole-class communication. The paper draws on the qualitative analysis of 23 interviews of first-year student teachers involved in "peer lecturing" in the framework of an introductory zoology course. In this study, the expressed gains in self-regulated learning described by the students are compared to the gains reported in the literature in other project-based methods and in peer teaching. Original gains in motivation ("social goals"), cognitive processes and self-regulation, are highlighted, while stressing differences between student types. Further development of the method is suggested.

This paper investigates how different perceptions of STEM are related to the anticipated levels of discrimination in STEM-related fields for minority high-school students in Israel. Regression analyses of questionnaire data (N = 380) from Arab-Palestinian (minority) and Jewish (majority) high-school students are conducted. The results suggest that for all students, perceiving STEM as cooperative is associated with reduced anticipated discrimination. Perceiving STEM as global and international is also associated with reduced anticipated discrimination, but only for minority students with the highest levels of social distance from mainstream society. The paper argues that for students who experience high levels of social distance, perceiving STEM as global or international creates a 'global space' wherein the salience of the local-national context -- which typically facilitates discrimination -- is reduced. Accordingly, the paper addresses larger debates regarding the conditions under which the globalisation of education may be empowering and/or threatening for minority students.

This paper examines two research questions: How do teachers refer to historical figures when teaching difficult past events? Which approaches to teaching difficult past events are reflected in teachers' ways of talking about historical figures? The paper is based on an analysis of lessons by three 11th grade history teachers in Israel on the controversial Altalena Affair. Each teacher assigned a different role to the historical figures. We argue that awareness of the relationship between the way teachers present historical figures and the way they handle controversial events may provide them with a tool for reflecting on their teaching practice.

Over the past few years, the civics curriculum for Israeli high-schools has become the centre of a heated political debate. Following this debate, in May 2016 a revised official textbook was introduced. This paper draws on an in-depth analysis of the revised official textbook, comparing it to the previous official textbook published in 2000. The analysis focuses on the discursive changes that took place regarding the ways in which the revised textbook conceptualises Israeli citizenship. A particular focus is placed on how the revised version of the official textbook often prioritises the ethno-national model of the nation state over and above the commitment to democratic values, including minority rights. The main argument of this paper is that these changes are a reflection of the penetration of a neo-Zionist discourse into the civics curriculum.

The study aimed to expose how pre-service teachers perceived the value of an inquiry-based geometrical task with dynamic geometry software for increasing and deepening their understanding of the task itself, and for heightening their mathematical, pedagogical, and technological knowledge in the case of reflection and transformation. Twenty-seven pre-service teachers studying to become middle-school (junior high) mathematics teachers were assigned an inquiry-based geometrical task to explore -- both by conventional, low-tech means (paper and pencil) and then in a dynamic geometry software (DGS) environment -- the properties of objects formed by reflections in polygons (triangles and quadrilaterals) and to offer conjectures and proofs regarding the final polygon's shape and area concerning the original. The results show that the majority of participants indicated that DGS provided a valuable instrument for revising and expanding their knowledge, that the assignment demonstrated the value that technological tools have in teaching and learning processes, and the importance of adapting learning tasks in geometry to a dynamic geometry environment for expanding and deepening geometrical and pedagogical knowledge and reasoning skills.

Purpose: The current study explored the process of emotion regulation among Ultra-Orthodox female teachers in Jewish educational system in Israel. Design/methodology/approach: The study employed a semi-structured interview comprising 13 Ultra-Orthodox female teachers in single-sex education for girls. Findings: The teachers preferred to suppress their positive and negative emotions rather than displaying them in their interactions with students, emphasizing the importance of self-restraint and self-control in their professional work and in their religious society. Originality/value: The paper sheds light on the connection between traditional societies whose culture is grounded deeply in their religious faith and teachers' modes of emotion regulation. The findings may enhance the understanding of cultural and contextual influences on teachers' emotion regulation and shed light on the ways in which female teachers balance their personal feelings with emotional rules in the religious society in which they live and work.

Computer simulations are considered efficient in supporting exploratory learning. This paper highlights instruction challenges and undesirable consequences on student learning in exploratory learning with computer simulations in classroom situations. A classroom with students who explore using simulations contains ideas explicated on several communicative channels. We use the professional noticing paradigm to demonstrate how a teacher's ability to listen to students' thinking via a brief encounter in real classroom setups can yield misconstrued interpretation of students' activity and impede learning. We present a case study where a teacher listens to students' thinking in building a model with a dynamic mathematics environment. We show how the teacher's response exacerbated those local confusions in ways that compromised the lesson's goals. We reflect on how the lesson's design influenced these outcomes and survey technology and activity developments to support teachers' noticing.

Success of curriculum reforms calls for both collaborative learning and unlearning processes. Focusing on the latter, school doubting process, an innovative term, is used in this paper as an active framework for organisational unlearning through which educators question their existing mind-sets and unfreeze old approaches to teaching and learning. This qualitative study explores how high school principals shape a school doubting process during the implementation of a national curriculum reform. The study analyses qualitative data from semi-structured interviews with 22 Israeli high school principals who have implemented a national curriculum reform from all school districts. The findings indicate two major themes and sub-themes: (1) Nurturing a collective unlearning culture: (a) restructuring school thinking; and (b) creating safe time and space for school doubting; (2) Building school capacity: (a) creating collective opportunities for knowledge and skill development; and (b) encouraging shared responsibility for innovation.

In this hybrid ethnographic case study, I explore how a cadre of Israeli-American parents in Los Angeles navigate the local Hebrew education landscape to seek linguistic resources for their children. I examine how participants envision Hebrew learning and determine the roles of Jewish, Israeli-serving, and public schools in transmitting Hebrew language, Judaism, and Israeli identity. Participants' perspectives on the vitality and utility of American Jewish institutions mediate their interest in various Hebrew learning offerings, surfacing cues that signal an institution's trustworthiness. This paper expands discourse on Hebrew education by foregrounding Israeli-heritage individuals' concerns regarding diasporic Hebrew learning.

Widespread use of the Internet in 21st century society is not risk-free. This paper studies the comorbidity of some problematic uses of Internet with depression in order to assess their correlation. With that aim, a meta-analysis of 19 samples obtained from 13 different studies (n=33,458) was carried out. The subjects of these studies are adolescents between the ages of 12 and 18 years ([mu]=15.68) from different cultures and continents (Europe, Euro-Asia, America and Asia). The effect size obtained from the use of a random-effects model (r=0.3, p<0.000) is significant, moderate and positive, thus confirming the relation between pathologic uses of the Internet and depression. Moreover, meta-regression test results showed that 9% of the variance (R2=0.09) is associated with the male gender, while age and culture are not significant variables. The variability rate of the studies is high (I2=87.085%), as a consequence of heterogeneity rather than publication bias, as Egger's regression test shows (1-tailed p-value=0.25; 2-tailed p-value=0.50, and [sigma]=1.57). Therefore, the need for specific interventions in secondary education dealing with this issue is evident to ensure that it does not extend into adult life.

In Israel, the awareness on the youth dropout from school problem has increased in the last decade. There is no doubt that dealing with this phenomenon poses a challenge to the Israeli society and to the authorities responsible for educational services. It turns out that certain groups among the Israeli population are at a higher risk of dropping out from school than others. As a result of it, many teenagers from these groups do not complete their high school studies and are unable to integrate in a qualitative and significant manner in the army and the labour market. Moreover, dropping out of the education system may have a significant impact on the mental and economic well-being of young generations of citizens. Therefore, preventing the problem of dropout and helping the youths to get back into the loop is a tremendous challenge to the Israeli education system. Even if in the last decade Israel registered lower rates of educational dropout then before, middle, and high-school students are still struggling with the issue. Therefore, the article underlines theoretical aspects regarding educational dropout as general framework and presents the specifics of the phenomenon in the Israelian educational system. The last part of the paper follows, based on secondary data analysis extracted from national official data, the differences between the two main state educational systems in Israel (Hebrew and Arabic) in terms of tendencies on educational dropout in the last ten school years. The data reveals that, even if there is progress in preventing educational dropout in both systems, the Arabic system registers significantly higher rates that the Hebrew educational system.

Describes a study of eighth graders that examined the effect of the use of a linked multiple representation software program on student conceptions of algebraic functions, including graphing techniques. Results of classroom observations and paper-and-pencil tests are discussed, and the adapted curriculum used in the experiment is described. (17 references) (LRW)

The paper presents the perspective of headmasters and educational staff in a sample of Arab high schools in Galilee, Israel, employing and serving a mixed population comprising Moslem and Christian communities. The paper describes efforts made by these schools to bring people closer, and examines programs designed for this purpose, and factors involved in these attempts. It also presents and discusses the role of school headmasters and leading staff, their contribution to the cause, and focused on their points of disagreements and their proposals regarding ways to improve the existing situation and promote social pluralism among students. The paper also presents, approaches prevailing in the Ministry of Education and local authorities, and examines educational programs designed by external and internal bodies, and other educational initiatives adopted by the participating schools, to increase tolerance and respect among students. In addition, the paper analyses goal-directed educational programs proposed and implemented by school headmasters and leading staff, lessons that could be drawn from these exercises and their implementation, and the headmaster's social status and influence in advancing social changes in the given community. The findings showed significant differences in the perception of situation between majority and minority community representatives in each given village. Furthermore, they clearly indicated that the students were not adequately exposed to each other's cultures and were significantly influenced by incorrect perceptions and superficial/erroneous interpretations. Thus, it was recommended to introduce intervention programs based on respect for difference, renunciation of enforced uniformity, promotion of maximal freedom of choice in the way of life, and dialog between different cultures.