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Purpose: This in-depth case study examined the mentor's role in mediating a culturally diverse community of student teachers-as-learners in the context of practice teaching in university teacher education in Israel. Specifically, it explored how the mentor's response to cultural aspects of learning to teach shaped the group's learning environment. Design/methodology/approach: Data collection included 23 video-recorded meetings of the learning community and semi-structured interviews with all four participants. Findings: Findings proposed six actions of the mentor that aimed at promoting an empathetic and supportive learning environment that encouraged collaborative talk around culturally diverse issues that surfaced during practice teaching. Implications for teacher education programs are presented and discussed. Practical implications: The study offers a practical framework of tools (or mentor actions) that can help mentors to promote social interactions in culturally diverse mentoring conversational settings. Originality/value: The study identified six actions that can serve as tools in mediating sensitive discourse to issues of diversity in communities of culturally diverse learners.

In 2020, Miriam Ben-Peretz, the Israel Scholar of 2006 and a member of the U.S. National Academy (in addition to being a recipient of Israel's EMET Prize for Research in Education and an American Educational Research Association Fellow) passed away. Ben-Peretz, whose life patterned Israel's contested history (including its wars), was equally well known worldwide and at home. This intellectual biography captures her career trajectory, her abridged academic family tree, her research interests, and how her scholarship spread at home and abroad. Her knowledge creations: curriculum making, curriculum potential and curriculum encounters, are spotlighted. Her longstanding relationship with, and support of MOFET (Institute for Research and Curriculum Development in Teacher Education), which was founded Israel's Ministry of Education, formed a seedbed for her knowledge utilization, knowledge mediation, and knowledge dissemination. Ben-Peretz's career illuminates how she, as a pioneering female and founding citizen of Israel, made headway so that others, could follow in her footsteps. How to live optimistically, despite encountering barriers that would break others, is the legacy that Miriam Ben-Peretz left.

This study investigated teachers' reported practices of teaching culture in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classrooms from the perspective of their approaches to student diversity. Specifically, it examined the relationship between teachers' orientations towards the cultural elements integrated in curriculum materials and their approaches to teaching cultural content in the context of linguistic, cultural, and religious diversity of Israeli schools. Interview data from three teacher groups -- majority, minority and immigrant -- obtained through open-ended questions, critical incidents and vignettes were interpreted through the lens of DOPA (Diversity in Organisations: Perceptions and Approaches) model. Thematic analysis yielded four distinct teacher profiles as related to teachers' approaches to student diversity, their curriculum orientations and subsequent use of the curriculum materials. The emergent profiles are discussed with regard to the ways of coping with diverse student populations developed by teachers in each group and reflected in adopted teaching practices.

This study investigates the role EFL teachers attribute to their linguistic and cultural repertoire in the professional learning process during induction. The study draws on the understanding that teacher learning occurs at the interplay between teachers' language and cultural background and teachers' experiences within the sociocultural context of their workplace. Thirty novice bilingual and multilingual EFL teachers teaching in Hebrew- and Arabic-speaking schools were interviewed to obtain information about their sociocultural and plurilingual background, learning processes and practices. Teachers' instructional materials were used for data triangulation. Inductive content analysis surfaces predominant themes related to teachers' plurilingual and cultural background as interwoven with cognitive, practical and personal dimensions of their professional role and identity construction. Teachers' learning processes and practices have been found to be linked to teachers' perceived sense of linguistic hierarchy, whereby English is granted a primary role, and other languages at the teachers' disposal, a secondary yet fundamental one, contributing to the agency exercised in teachers' practices. Given their multiple language learning experiences, multilingual teachers exhibit stances towards teaching reflective of more 'experienced' than 'novice' teachers, particularly broader representations of language acquisition issues. The findings call for the recognition of EFL teachers' plurilingual multicompetencies in their practices.

As part of a larger mixed-method study on teacher evaluation, this paper explores how cultural and socio-political contexts of the Israeli Arab public schools inform principals' high-stakes evaluation processes for attaining tenure. Concepts from micropolitical theory were used to analyse data from in-depth semi-structured interviews with twenty novice teachers and twenty principals. Findings from the qualitative data suggest that power relations and contextual features of Israeli-Arab society such as collectivism and face-keeping direct how decisions are made and limit the work of the actors involved. The study provides insights into how principals exercise their power to attain what they interpret as teacher quality while evaluating teachers, and how the latter interpret such power relations in their local contexts. It also suggests the need for substantive groundwork in preparing prospective teachers for the high-stakes teacher evaluation processes that characterise the Israeli-Arab education system and the efforts to maintain teacher quality.

The people who prepare teachers -- teacher educators -- are often explicitly or implicitly held accountable for teacher quality and are frequently blamed when school students do not meet national or international expectations. Despite high expectations, historically there has been little attention to the education of teacher educators or to local and larger policies that would support the development of teacher educators who are prepared to meet the complex demands of teaching teachers for the twenty-first century. This includes addressing the persistent discrepancies and "gaps" between historically privileged and disadvantaged groups in terms of educational opportunities and outcomes. In this article, Cochran-Smith and colleagues analyze how teacher educators are educated in four different countries -- the U.S., New Zealand, Israel, and Norway -- which vary considerably in terms of their historical, geopolitical, and policy contexts. The article suggests that international perspectives on the policies and practices related to the education of teachers and teacher educators are important politically, sociologically and educationally. They reveal commonalities and differences in how those in power desire to shape the education of those who will shape the lives of society's future participants and reveal a great deal about nations' priorities, assumptions, and values related to equity and inequity.

Situated in the context of English as a foreign language (EFL) pre-service teacher education in Israel, the study surfaces connections between student teachers' (STs) evolving beliefs about teachers and teaching, their experiences during teacher education and career intentions. Findings distinguish between three distinct student teacher profiles as related to belief change and its influence on dispositions to learning and aspired career trajectories; the three groups differ in interpretation of knowledge and experience, conceptualising problems and approaching career planning. Our findings add nuance to the discussion of STs' beliefs as a response to past experiences and the impact of the socio-cultural context on STs' learning to teach. The findings are elaborated and discussed with implications for the preparation of prospective teachers.

Eating disorders (EDs) have been documented in various cultural settings. A continuous increase in ED' rates among non-Western cultures (e.g., Arab cultures and East-Asian cultures) has been reported. We aimed to investigate the relations among culture, ED symptoms, and psychological features that are highly relevant in EDs through a cultural comparison of three groups. The groups included female university students in Israel with varying levels of exposure to Westernization: 118 Jewish students, 132 Arab students studying at a mixed university with a Jewish majority, and 111 Arab students studying at Sakhnin College, a college for Arab students only. The groups differed significantly on the Conservation Value dimension from the Short Portrait Values Questionnaire. Four psychological features were examined as predictors of ED symptoms: Interoceptive-deficits, Ineffectiveness, Asceticism, and Maturity-fear. The results revealed a comparable prevalence of self-reported ED symptoms among Arabs and Jews, with a small exception for bulimic symptoms, which were less prevalent among those in the Sakhnin group, who also scored lower on Ineffectiveness and higher on asceticism than the other groups. Testing the relations between the four psychological features and ED symptoms revealed that culture played a moderating role in predicting the strength of ineffectiveness and maturity-fear. Ineffectiveness was not a predictor among the Sakhnin group, whereas maturity-fear was not a predictor in the least conservative Jewish group. Asceticism and interoceptive-deficits predicted ED symptoms across all study groups. Our findings indicate that the problem of EDs may be similar among Arab and Jewish women in Israel. Moreover, despite some similarities in the relevance of some ED-related psychological features, other features are moderated by culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The learning value attributed to perceptual and conceptual modes of "seeing" in context, underscore their significance as integral to the practice teaching experience. Programmatically, it challenges teacher educators to design observation approaches and activities that allow for associating perceptual experiences with conceptual understandings. From a research perspective, it invites people to inquire into the nature of student teacher learning as prompted by such observation tasks and activities--the focus of the present study. The participants in the study were 30 junior student teachers, all of which were in their second year of a teacher training bachelor's program. This inquiry focused on the meanings that student teachers attribute to the experience of observation in practice teaching and on how these meanings can be interpreted as learning experiences. Drawing on inductive, recursive cycles of close interpretative readings, this study examined novices' sense-making of their experience of observation, as exhibited in their entries. The different forms of "seeing as," "seeing in," and "seeing that" identified in this study suggest the need to help students to make connections between the different forms of seeing, in an effort to conceptualize experience at higher levels of "seeing that." Specifically, the authors propose thinking of questions that challenge the articulation of insights about the uniqueness of a particular observed context (seeing in) alongside similarities and differences across contexts (seeing as); in an effort to encourage student teachers to conceptualize these articulated insights as "cases of" or "seeing that." Providing students with questions that raise their awareness of the learning value of dissonant experiences, might help them to distinguish the learning potential intrinsic in the multidimensional, simultaneous, immediate and unpredictable teaching reality of the classroom situations they observe, which they often fail to see as meaningful experiences

This study investigates how mentor talk unfolds in a community of learners during an entire school year in the context of practice teaching in university teacher education. Specifically, it focuses on how emergent styles and patterns of mentor's talk shaped power relations in the discourse, promoting different kinds of learning environments. Data collection included 23 video-recorded meetings of the learning community of 11 student teachers and a university mentor and 25 semi-structured interviews with all participants including the mentor. Findings show that styles and patterns of mentor talk are central to how a particular learning environment in a community develops. Implications for pre-service mentors' roles in the context of student teacher learning in a community are discussed.

Many countries experience a high percentage of teachers who leave the profession before retirement. Most of the explanations, such as teacher burnout, adopt a pathogenic point of view which perceives attrition as a negative work outcome. In contrast, the qualitative project that this article is based on, which characterizes the career decision-making processes of 34 Israeli teachers, adopts a salutogenic perspective. This view allows for approaching attrition as a career decision which reflects the meaning teachers attach to their work. Drawing on a model which identifies three orientations toward work (job, calling and career), this article describes career stories of teachers who left teaching in order to illustrate how their work orientation shaped their decision.

We present findings from an in-depth study on a school-based multi-disciplinary learning community in the context of practice teaching in university pre-service education. We elaborate on one of the three predominant patterns of talk identified, the "star" pattern, and show how it created particular power relations in the discourse which eventually triggered occasions for learning in community. The community of learners consisted of 11 student teachers and a university mentor who functioned as a tutor responsible for facilitating the group discussion. The group met on a weekly basis throughout an entire academic year (23 meetings). Data collection included recordings of all meetings and semi-structured interviews with all participants including the mentor (altogether 25 interviews). Findings suggest that the "star" pattern of talk constitutes a powerful channel for promoting learning in the context of a community of learners.

This study suggests an integrative qualitative methodological framework for capturing complexity in mentoring activity. Specifically, the model examines how historical developments of a discipline direct mentors' mediation of professional knowledge through the language that they use. The model integrates social activity theory and a framework of critical discourse analysis to guide the data collection, analysis and interpretation processes. Drawing on the case of mentoring in Arts Education, we describe and discuss the discursive character of the interactions between content and pedagogy in mentoring activity, as they grow out of the larger historical groundings of participants' practice.

This article presents and discusses the findings of a study which focused on student teachers' evaluation of their practice teaching in the context of a university-school partnership model integrated for the first time into the academic programme of a university teacher education department in Israel. A questionnaire was developed to examine the contribution of the major curricular components of the partnership for student teachers' experience of learning to teach, as evaluated by the student teachers themselves. The questionnaire was delivered to 119 student teachers placed in 9 selected school-university partnerships. The findings of the study underscore the added value of supporting different kinds of mentoring frameworks within university-school partnerships. The international significance of the study is discussed with a focus on implications for emergent tensions, dilemmas and connections between local and global forms of university-school partnerships.

The COVID‐19 pandemic, and the response of governments to mitigate the pandemic's spread, resulted in exceptional circumstances that comprised a major global stressor, with broad implications for mental health. We aimed to delineate anxiety trajectories over three time‐points in the first 6 months of the pandemic and identify baseline risk and resilience factors that predicted anxiety trajectories. Within weeks of the pandemic onset, we established a website (covid19resilience.org), and enrolled 1362 participants (n = 1064 from US; n = 222 from Israel) who provided longitudinal data between April–September 2020. We used latent growth mixture modelling to identify anxiety trajectories and ran multivariate regression models to compare characteristics between trajectory classes. A four‐class model best fit the data, including a resilient trajectory (stable low anxiety) the most common (n = 961, 75.08%), and chronic anxiety (n = 149, 11.64%), recovery (n = 96, 7.50%) and delayed anxiety (n = 74, 5.78%) trajectories. Resilient participants were older, not living alone, with higher income, more education, and reported fewer COVID‐19 worries and better sleep quality. Higher resilience factors' scores, specifically greater emotion regulation and lower conflict relationships, also uniquely distinguished the resilient trajectory. Results are consistent with the pre‐pandemic resilience literature suggesting that most individuals show stable mental health in the face of stressful events. Findings can inform preventative interventions for improved mental health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on qualitative methodologies that integrate verbal and non-verbal texts, this study investigated novice teachers' attributions of their experiences of internship, as conveyed through a visual text. Novices were invited to design a visual text that represented their experience during internship, as part of a national call entitled "Novices in Poster." The posters submitted yielded the publication of 127 published posters, which constituted the data for our study. The visual data were analyzed using a multilayered approach to the analysis of visual texts, drawing on Lemke's analysis of visual and verbal data as complementary channels for obtaining an integrative interpretation of the expressed experience. Findings indicate that novices expose critical stances in relation to activism, collegiality, and leverage, making public their unique potential to improve the educational system. The visual texts underscored novices' strong social--professional stances towards teaching, positioning them as delegates and agents striving for professional justice.

This paper examines the nature of moral dilemmas mentors from three different national groups (Jewish, Druze, and Arab) encounter in their work in Israeli Arab schools, how they manage these dilemmas in practice, and how the nature of particular dilemmas might connect to their management strategies. Given the multicultural and politically conflictive context of the Israeli society, a cultural and political reading of in-service mentors' moral dilemmas reveals that mentors' encounter and management of recurrent moral dilemmas is embedded in cultural and political issues in a way that seem to hinder their mentoring practice. Preparation programs for mentors need to highlight awareness of mentors' own culture and that of their mentees in order to implement a culturally and politically responsive practice. (Contains 2 tables and 1 figure.)

Moral dilemmas, mentoring, cultural and political friction, culturally responsive mentoring, Israel national groups. [Extracted from the article]

In this article we offer an extended reading of an action research model in the context of mentored learning in preservice education in Israel. Our reading attends both to how a particular form of action research plays out in participants' constructions of the practice of mentoring and mentored learning and how such constructions can be understood in the wider context of interrelations between activity systems, as offered through the lens of activity theory. Such an embedded reading can illuminate on the gaps and contradictions between different educational practices, directing participants' processes and outcomes of learning, as they actively transform their practice while trying to mediate between these contradictions.

In a national contest of story writing in Israel, first-year teachers from all educational sectors were invited to write a story that mirrors their first year of teaching experience. The narrative analysis of the stories sheds light on the hostile and adverse sides of teaching, surfacing novices' sense of impotence in their capacity to act. The stories also shed light on the "human side" of teachers and teaching, reflecting the plots, heroes, and dramas that surround any teacher, regardless of the stage of professional expertise. Implications for the integration of narrative thought within the curricula in teacher education programs are discussed. (Contains 1 table.)

Framed as collective case studies, this study examined the perspectives that mentors, who are considered exemplary in the field, exhibit towards mentoring in different mentoring contexts in the Israeli school system from a variety of view points: The mentors themselves, their mentees, supervisors, school principals, and project leaders. Mentoring contexts are distinguished by their organisational, instructional and professional orientations towards teaching and mentoring. Perspectives towards mentoring are reflected in the language that the mentor uses in order to describe his/her work and the behavior that the mentor exhibits as it plays out in his/her actions. The findings of the study reveal that, despite the different contexts of practice, star mentors shared common perspectives towards mentoring in terms of educational ideologies and envisioned roles and practices, exhibited through the use of a similar professional language. We also learned that these attributed meanings were highly congruent with their mentees, principals, supervisors and colleagues' perceptions of the mentors' practice. The common emergent themes that surfaced in mentors and their respective participants' characterizations of their practice were: Organisational skills, interpersonal relationships, integration of theory and practice, knowledge and expertise, challenge, modelling and reflexivity. Mentors also acted upon some of these characterizations in unique, idiosyncratic ways, guided by the distinctiveness of their organisational and educational mentoring context. Thus, alongside similar ideologies and beliefs across contexts we also identified differences as to the emphasis that each mentor gave to a particular aspect of organisation, knowledge and relationships.

Drawing on extant theorizing and research on reflective teaching, this paper discusses the impact of an innovative methods course designed around the activity of student teachers' reflections on their own classroom discourse, for their understandings of the connections between theory and practice. Situated in the context of foreign language pre-service teacher education in Israel, and focusing on one aspect of a larger research study on the connections that student teachers make between theory and practice, this paper presents three exemplary cases of student teachers' learning. The connections exhibited by these three student teachers between theory (principles of pedagogy) and practice (the classroom discourse patterns that characterized their teaching) were interpreted as: (1) understanding how practice fits theory; (2) connecting theory and practice to generate grounded theories of practice; and (3) developing practical theories. We discuss these findings as related to the idiosyncratic character of students teachers' learning and to activities in teacher education that enhance reflection on the meeting between theory and practice.

Situated in the context of a one year in-service professional development program for mentors in Israel, this study explored the process and content of mentors' professional conversations as opportunities for collaboratively constructing knowledge about mentoring. The analysis of the monthly conversations, conducted throughout an entire academic year, followed recurrent cycles of close interpretative readings to identify issues of process, content, and learning throughout the conversations. The analysis of the process of the conversations yielded the identification of three different forms of dialogues that operated complementarily in the conversations: "Convergent dialogues", "parallel dialogues" and "divergent dialogues". Analysis of the content of the conversations revealed that each of these dialogues constituted unique opportunities for participants to co-construct meanings about a different dimension of the practice of mentoring. In "convergent dialogues" participants mediated understandings that converged into learning about possible solutions to a particular dilemma in mentoring. "Divergent dialogues" featured participants' use of the conversation space to depart from their personal contexts of mentoring in order to explore, compare and make connections across practices. In these dialogues participants shifted the focus of the conversation to issues outside their particular contexts, engaging in a kind of theorizing about mentoring. In "parallel dialogues", participants used the conversation space as a setting for developing their own ideas in a kind of "dialogue with themselves". These dialogues provided important opportunities for participants to discriminate and dispute their own ideologies and fixed assumptions. The study suggests that the value of professional support frameworks designed around a conversation component lies both in its potential for creating different and varied kinds of dialogues, as well as in the active role that the facilitator or "mentor of mentors" plays in identifying the different dialogic possibilities in professional conversations. (Contains 2 notes.)

Drawing on the methodology of critical incidents, this study sets out to explore the perspectives that 20 experienced in-service mentors in Israel adopt towards critical incidents in their work, as they account for how they reason about and act upon these incidents. Mentors' stories of critical incidents shed light on the complex nature of mentors' professional expertise, reflected in the finding that experienced mentors' reasoning and behaviour constantly fluctuates between a novice and an expert stage, depending upon the nature of the situation and the type of mentor-mentee interaction that the mentor is confronted with. The study supports the more dynamic, discontinuous and interactionist view of the acquisition of expertise, highlighting the regressions and progressions that play out when experienced professionals take up an additional role, such as in the passage from teaching to mentoring.

This paper is the result of my inquiry into the nature of my constructivist pedagogy in the context of a postgraduate course that focused on theoretical and practical dimensions of mentoring at a major university in the north of Israel. Drawing on four critical incidents in my university teaching, I address the question: What happens when you teach a course characterized by a process-oriented, constructivist discourse to post graduate students who hold leadership roles, such as mentors of teachers, in an educational system characterized by a predominantly product-oriented discourse?. Drawing on four illustrative cases, each of which highlights a particular "crack in the iceberg", I discuss the understandings that I gained about constructivist pedagogy as I reflected on these incidents. The four critical incidents surface four major tensions that reflected the "competing discourses" (Miller-Marsh, 2002) that played out in my constructivist pedagogy: Problem solving discourse versus Dilemmatic discourse; Constructive discourse versus Constructing discourse; Language of discourse versus Approach of discourse; and Leading discourse versus Emerging discourse. The critical incidents have made me realize that identifying "cracks in the iceberg" has as much to do with becoming aware of my personal "cracks" hiding underneath the "tip of the iceberg" as with surfacing the tensions between my constructivist agenda and participants' agendas. Laying open these discourses and challenging their underlying assumptions, in the context of mentoring conversations and personal narrative accounts of practice, seems essential for reconstructing more authentic "curriculum stories".

The complex cultural mosaic of EFL teaching and teacher education in Israel calls for the need to explore how different ethnic and cultural backgrounds shape prospective EFL teachers' perspectives about their roles and practices as communicative teachers; an approach solidly entrenched in western, democratic views of teaching and learning. Focusing on one aspect of communicative language teaching, the function of L1 and L2 for promoting communication, this qualitative-interpretative study explored the perspectives that 14 Arab and Jewish EFL student teachers adopted towards the use of L1 (mother tongue) and L2 (target language). The study was conducted within the context of student teachers' reflections on their classroom discourse during practice teaching. Student teachers were asked to record, transcribe and reflect on one classroom lesson implemented in their practice teaching through a series of guiding questions. The questions aimed at encouraging reflection at levels of mapping and naming teaching and learning behaviours, connecting between theoretical notions and their realisation in "action", surfacing gaps between expectations and reality, interpreting, scrutinising and appraising particular teaching and learning behaviours. The inductive analysis revealed that both Jewish and Arab student teachers exhibited new insights regarding the different purposes for which L1 can be used in a communicative lesson. Novices reported to have gained a more situated and realistic perspective of the various uses of mother tongue in communicative teaching as a result of analysing their own classroom discourse. The findings shed light on the striking similarities between Arab and Jewish student teachers in regard to the new understandings gained about the use of L1/L2 in communicative lessons. The uniform perspectives exhibited by novices, regardless of their socio-cultural background, challenged our initial assumptions regarding the differences that we would expect to find between Arab and Jewish student teachers on the issue. Thus, as the title of this paper suggests, student teachers "however different", exhibited "similar" perspectives towards the use of L1/L2 in EFL communicative lessons. The question of why socio-cultural differences were mitigated is discussed through three inter-related themes that might account for such similarities: (1) the state of being a novice, (2) the "culture" of EFL teaching and, (3) the homogeneous character of the teacher education programme.

This qualitative study examines mentors' interpretations of their practice as revealed through writing and discussing their cases in a university postgraduate course in Israel. The data were examined for emergent features of the practice of in-service mentoring in the Jewish and Arab sectors within the Israeli school system. Content analysis of the cases and of the discussions that followed their presentation in class revealed a unique "discourse of mentoring" or "language of practice" that reflected mentors' concerns over issues of "accountability" and "boundaries" of roles in their practice. From a programmatic perspective, the study reveals that a university teacher-education course based on case-method pedagogy constitutes a safe and challenging context for mentors to voice dilemmas inherent in their field experiences that are often silenced by the system. (Contains 2 tables and 3 notes.)

Describes one mentor teacher's development in understanding the influence of instructional context on her ability to successfully mentor, comparing patterns identified to novice teachers' developmental stages. Results reveal that learning to mentor is a conscious process of induction into a different teaching context and does not emerge naturally from being a good teacher. Implications for teacher education are noted. (SM)

Fall Armyworm (Spodoptera frugiperda) (FAW) is endemic to tropical and subtropical regions of North and South America. FAW larvae, if not well managed can cause significant yield losses to various important crops, such as maize, rice and cotton. In Israel, populations of FAW have been found since 2018 damaging many maize fields. Management of FAW relies mainly on the use of insecticides; however, this pest has evolved high resistance levels to many insecticides, worldwide. To prevent or delay the development of insecticide resistance, resistance management strategy should be employed to decrease FAW exposure to insecticides. Our study is focusing on resistance management of FAW and field resistance monitoring to main control agents along with the use of biorationalselective insecticides and other non-chemical methods. The objective of the current study was to establish a baseline susceptibility of FAW larvae to insecticides such as diamides, IGRs and Bt. We rear a reference population, without exposure to any pesticide, on artificial diet under standard controlled room conditions. To date, we have assayed various recommended insecticides against third instars of FAW. During May 2022, we have collected larvae of FAW from maize fields, located in the eastern warm valley of Israel and they were tested for their susceptibility to various insecticides. We intend to assay late-season FAW populations as well. An outcome of this study is to form an IPM-IRM strategy that will have the ability to decrease FAW exposure to insecticides and to increase the use of other environmentally-friendly pest control practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: Cross‐cultural comparisons that focus on underlying psychological mechanisms in disordered eating (DE) are lacking. With the aim of addressing this gap, we investigated the interplay between mentalizing, distress, and DE in two cultural groups: the ultra‐Orthodox and secular Jewish societies in Israel. Method: A combination of performance‐based and self‐report measures of two mentalizing‐related constructs (emotional awareness and alexithymia), along with self‐report measures of distress, DE, and values preferences, were employed in a community sample (N = 300) of ultra‐Orthodox and secular Jewish women. Results: Distress predicted DE in both cultural groups, yet there were cultural differences in the moderating role of mentalizing. Both mentalizing measures moderated the distress‒DE link in the secular group, but not in the ultra‐Orthodox group. Furthermore, there were cultural differences in the moderating effects of self versus other mentalizing. Conclusions: The results suggest cultural differences in the underlying psychological mechanism of DE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The loshn koydesh (Hebrew and Aramaic) component has historically influenced the development of Yiddish lexis and grammar. We examine its contemporary use among 26 native speakers of contemporary Hasidic Yiddish from Israel, New York, and London using a written questionnaire examining the gender of loshn koydesh nouns, periphrastic verbs with a Hebrew/Aramaic element, and adjectives derived from the loshn koydesh element of periphrastics. Our findings show that there are differences on both the geographical and gender axes, many of which are consistent with the speakers' varied exposure to Modern Hebrew, English, and loshn koydesh. We also found that the loshn koydesh component has developed since the pre-War stage of the language in ways that seem to affect contemporary Hasidic Yiddish usage in all locations and for both genders. We take these developments to provide evidence for the existence of this newly emergent variety of Yiddish – Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A study conducted in Israel and the United States to develop a scale of students' satisfaction with college instruction, to assess the dimensions behind the scale, and to examine four predictors (sex, major, school year, and academic performance) that may affect satisfaction with instruction is presented. (Author/MLW)

Tested the hypothesis that there is a negative relationship between the occupational specificity of academic programs and students' instructional satisfaction with students from three different academic programs. Results supported the negative relationship model with both statistically significant differences and substantial relationships. (Author/RC)

Examined the relationship between university professors' (N=120) work orientation and attitudes toward their work. Found that a global work orientation is a strong predictor of attitudes toward intrinsic aspects of work in social sciences and a moderate predictor in physical sciences. (Author)

This exploratory study employed correspondence analysis to examine how employees' gender and marital status might affect levels of interpersonal and organizational deviant workplace behaviors in the workplace. The subjects were 122 employees from a large electricity supplier company in Israel. Four levels of deviant behaviors relating to interpersonal and organizational deviance behaviors were generated according to their "typicality" as follows: (1) "untypical" (z-score less than −1.00), (2) "somewhat untypical" (−1.00–0), (3) "somewhat typical" (0–1.00), and (4) "typical" (larger than 1.00). We assessed the marital status categories by gender: unmarried males and females, divorced males and females, and males and females who were married. Results indicated that married men and divorced women exhibited mostly typical types of deviance. Both married and divorced men reported untypical deviance for both types of deviant behaviors. Married women only reported somewhat untypical deviance for both types of deviant behaviors. Accordingly, we suggest that psychological stressors, as well as cultural and societal expectations, may account for the obtained differences. Yet, future research is needed to shed light on underlying mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature records that educational technologies have the power to ‘colonise’ societal cultures. However, this study asserts the co-existence of a counter power through which societal cultures may ‘colonise’ educational technologies too. This assumption of power struggle is examined by addressing the question: to what extent do societal cultures colonise educational technologies? This question is answered using a qualitative and quantitative enquiry into Israeli society. Having analysed the data, it is found that societies consist of beliefs, attitudes and behaviours that may challenge the determination of educational technologies. This could be seen as empirical evidence suggesting that, although educational technologies may seek to colonise societies, societies may seek to colonise educational technologies as well, with the two entities engaging in a politically reciprocal relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Megiddo pottery assemblages of the Iron Age I, IIA, and IIB periods are well known, but those of the Iron IIC have received little attention. In this paper, the Iron IIC pottery assemblages o f Strata III and II are presented and discussed. Based on this analysis, it follows that this period can be divided into two phases: the Early Iron IIC and Late Iron IIC. In light of this proposed subdivision, Megiddo and other key sites in northern Israel are analyzed and chronological and historical implications evaluated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined how implicit and explicit changes following integrative inpatient treatment of adolescents with eating disorder (ED) may predict the posttreatment ratings of psychodynamic therapists of their patients’ openness to therapeutic processes and their change (Therapist Evaluation Inventory). The relative contribution of inpatients’ ego functions was compared with that of their mental distress and ED symptoms in two subgroups: restricting type anorexia (AN-R) and binging/purging type EDs (B/P). Data indicated that the implicit personality variable of elevated ability to modulate affects was the best predictor of therapist-rated global outcome among patients with B/P symptoms, whereas in patients with AN-R, evolving openness to implicit negative affects and a reduction in reported distress were best predictors. In patients with AN-R, attenuated affect control was also significantly correlated with therapist posttreatment ratings. These data point that in addition to addressing behavioral/symptomatic aspects, personality variables should be addressed in the psychological treatment of EDs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this research, we investigated the psychological sense of feeling wronged as an advantaged group member. By feeling wronged, we refer to advantaged group members who experience themselves being unfairly accused for harboring racial or ethnic biases. Drawing on research on moral threat to the ingroup, we predicted that feeling wronged would lead advantaged group members to legitimize the social hierarchy they are benefiting from, which in turn can undermine their intentions to redress group-based inequality. Study 1 demonstrated that to the extent advantaged group members (both in Italy and the USA) felt wronged predicted their perceptions of group-based disparities as more legitimate, which in turn weakened their intentions to act for promoting social change. Study 2 replicated the effect using an experimental manipulation of unfair blame among a sample of Israeli-Jews. Results are discussed in light of relevant work on competitive victimhood and inverted relative deprivation. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In the current research we investigated social settings through which attributions to discrimination are undermined. Drawing on work linking intergroup contact to perceptions of inequality, we tested the prediction that experiences of commonality-focused contact would reduce disadvantaged group members'' tendency to attribute negative treatment of fellow group members to discrimination. In Study 1 students were randomly assigned to either a commonality-focused, differences-focused, or no-contact condition, ostensibly with a student from a higher status university. Commonality-focused interactions led participants to view the status hierarchy as more legitimate, and consequently, to be less likely to attribute negative treatment to discrimination. In Study 2 this effect was replicated among Ethiopian-Jews (a disadvantaged minority in Israel) who reported the amount of commonality-focused contact they experience with non-Ethiopian Jews. Theoretical and practical implications regarding intergroup contact and perceptions of inequality are discussed. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The present study investigates social cognition impairments in 29 women with bingeing/purging spectrum eating disorders (ED) compared to 27 healthy controls.: Measures were used to examine encoding and representational processes in relation to affect perception and affect attribution, as well as the ability to recognize mental causality in social relationships.: ED patients failed to correctly encode causality in interpersonal relations, exhibited deficits in their ability to ascribe behaviour to mental states, and showed a greater tendency to attribute negative affects in interpersonal relationships. Stepwise regression analyses suggested that ED symptoms could account for deficits in the recognition of causality in interpersonal relations.: In addition to addressing ED symptoms, social cognition deficits should be addressed in the psychological treatment of EDs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although transient hyperphosphatasemia (TH) has been well known for decades, its etiology and pathophysiology remain unclear. We aimed to study the clinical characteristics of children diagnosed with TH compared to older studies in order to expand our knowledge and understanding of this condition and to try and find a subgroup of children who are more prone to develop TH. We retrospectively studied 60 children diagnosed at Maccabi Health Services and Bnai Zion Medical Center, Haifa, Israel with TH between the years 2003-08. One hundred and twenty-two children matched by age, gender and presenting symptoms served as the control group. The patients were divided into four subgroups by their presenting symptoms: infectious disease 33%, failure to thrive 28%, diarrhea 15% and other 23%. The Hydragel 7 ISO-PAL® and Hydragel 15 ISO-PAL® kits were used for the identification and quantification of ALP isoenzymes in human serum. The ALP levels of the study group were 805-8619 U\L (mean 2311 U\L), without differences between the subgroups. The mean duration of TH was 12 weeks. ALP isoenzymes levels were measured in one-third of the patients, and showed that the bone isoenzyme was elevated in most. Forty-three (71%) subjects were diagnosed in the second half of the calendar year. We could not establish an etiological explanation for TH. We presume that it is a complex mechanism in which different stimuli led to upregulation of the enzyme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Western feminist discourse has overlooked a group of unique women of the first immigration waves from Yemen to Israel. They were among the pioneers of feminism in their society - although they could neither read nor write and had never heard of the term "feminism." They lived between the years 1881-1914, side by side with the "founding pioneering mothers of the Labor Movement, and with the ladies of the "Moshavot" - agricultural gentry who had transplanted their bourgeois lifestyles from Europe to Palestine. This group of women from Yemen has also been ignored by Israeli historiography, which has not yet accorded them the full attention they deserve. These independent Yemenite women were perhaps without a public voice, but with strong will power they took their own fate and that of their families into their own hands. This paper presents a feminist interpretation of the story of Shoshana Bassin's life. Shoshana was a young girl when she had arrived to the Holy Land with her parents in 1904, she wrote her memoirs many decades later. Her story serves as case study for comprehending Yemenite Women's lives that were full of crises and resolutions in Israel at the turn of the twentieth century, as well as a study of women's fight for their human rights for education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Situated in the context of Israeli in-service education, this article explores the development of the author's understanding of the process of learning to mentor from the acquisition of communicative competencies (as identified in an initial study), toward a more discursive view of the process as "participation in competing discourses of practice" (as identified in subsequent studies). Recent work has revealed the intricacies and complexities entailed in translating from one language (teaching) to another (mentoring) , often positioning mentors as "lost in translation." Specifically, studies shed light on issues of morality, expertise, context, and conditions for learning to mentor. To discuss the author's evolving understandings, she attends to three interrelated themes: Mentoring as connected to teaching, mentoring as distinct from teaching, and conditions for learning to mentor. Finally, the author addresses the question, So what? to consolidate her emergent understandings of the metaphor, framed as assertions for thinking about the practice of mentoring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined a causal model of the determinants of students9 evaluation of instruction. The model was tested in four levels of academic areas (Neumann & Neumann, 1983). The results of path analysis and regression analysis indicated a distinct division between levels 1 and 2 on one hand, and levels 3 and 4 on the other hand. Level of instruction was the most dominant predictor of the cognitive contribution of the course on all levels. On levels 1 and 2, students' involvement also played an important role in predicting cognitive contribution. Level of instruction was the single major predictor of the overall assessment of the course on levels 3 and 4. On levels 1 and 2, three independent variables contributed to overall assessment: cognitive contribution, students' involvement, and level of instruction. The implications of the study are discussed and elaborated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: Crohn's disease in Israel was described in the past as being of low incidence, more common in Europe-America-born Jews than other Jews, and of uncharacteristically low morbidity. However, recent experience has suggested that these premises are no longer correct. Methods: The records of all hospital and outpatient cases of Crohn's disease in southern Israel for the period 1968-1992 were reviewed. Private family practitioners and specialists were contacted to assure complete case ascertainment. Results: The prevalence rate of Crohn's disease among Jews on December 31, 1992, was 50.6/105 (Asia-Africa-born Jews 55.0/105, Europe-America-born Jews 58.7/105), and the rate was 8.2/105 among Bedouin Arabs. The annual incidence rate (1987-1992) was calculated as 4.2/105/yr in Jews (Asia-Africa-born 4.6/105/yr, Europe-America-born 3.9/ 105/yr). The age of presentation declined progressively over the study period, was lower in Israel-born patients than immigrants, and was lower in ileocolonic versus other sites of disease. Conclusions: The data show that Crohn's disease has become more common in Jews in Israel, losing ethnic differences of frequency, and that it occurs at a younger age than before. In Arabs, the disease is more rare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Two dedicated field experiments carried to quantify the CO 2 residual trapping in-situ at 1.6 km depth. • The experimental procedures and results of these experiments are presented. • Hydraulic withdrawal test as a characterization method was robust and gave a clear signal. • Tracer experiments can give more detailed information of CO 2 residual distribution but are more complicated to carry out. Two dedicated field experiments have been carried out at the Heletz, Israel pilot CO 2 injection site. The objective has been to quantify the CO 2 residual trapping in-situ, based on two distinctly different methods. Both experiments are based on the principle of a combination of hydraulic, thermal and/or tracer tests before and after creating the residually trapped zone of CO 2 and using the difference in the responses of these tests to estimate the in-situ residual trapping. In Residual Trapping Experiment I (RTE I), carried out in autumn 2016, the main characterization test before and after the creation of the residually trapped zone were hydraulic withdrawal tests. In this experiment, the residually trapped zone was also created by fluid withdrawal, by first injecting CO 2 , then withdrawing fluids until CO 2 was at residual saturation. The second experiment, Residual Trapping Experiment II (RTE II), was carried out autumn 2017. In this experiment, the residually trapped CO 2 zone was created by CO 2 injection, followed by the injection of CO 2 -saturated water, to push away the mobile CO 2 and leave the residually trapped CO 2 behind. In this test, the main reference test carried out before and after creating the residually trapped zone was injection and recovery of gas partitioning tracer Krypton. This paper presents the experimental procedures and results of these experiments. A hydraulic withdrawal test as a characterization method was robust and gave a clear signal. Given the difficulties in injecting water optimally saturated with CO 2 , in order not to dissolve the residually trapped CO 2 or to create situations with excess mobile gas, withdrawal test may also be a generally preferable hydraulic testing method, in comparison to injection. The limitation of any hydraulic test is that it only gives an averaged value over the test section. At Heletz additional information about CO 2 distribution was obtained based on thermal measurements and by monitoring the pressure difference between the two sensors in the bolehole. The latter could be used to estimate the amount of mobile CO 2 in the well test section. Tracer experiments with gas partitioning tracers can in principle give more detailed information of CO 2 residual distribution in the reservoir than hydraulic tests can, but are also far more complicated to carry out, involving sophisticated and sensitive equipment. In the Heletz case the optimal injection of CO 2 -saturated water turned out to be difficult to achieve. Creating the zone of residual saturation by means of fluid withdrawal rather than by injecting CO 2 -saturated water seemed a more robust approach. Monitoring the gas contents in the test interval gave good guidance on the state of the system. Model interpretations of the two experiments to obtain values for CO2 residual saturation are presented in companion papers in this same Special Edition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: To evaluate whether exposure to Rho-associated protein kinase (ROCK) inhibitor will promote human-cultured corneal endothelial cells (CECs) survival in a commercial storage medium. Setting: Edith Wolfson Medical Center, Holon, and Sheba Medical Center, Tel Hashomer, Israel. Design: Experimental study. Methods: Fragments of human donor corneolimbal rings were stored in commercial storage media for 1 week, half with the addition of 10 [mu]M ROCK inhibitor (Y-27632). Evaluation of CECs for early and late apoptosis\necrosis rates was performed using anti-human CD166 antibody and flow cytometric double staining analysis of propidium iodide and Annexin V. Results: CECs of 6 corneolimbal rings demonstrated a reduced early apoptosis rate (4.35% +/- 1.07% vs 12.18% +/- 5.5%, P =.026) and a reduced late apoptosis\necrosis rate (5.5% +/- 2.39% vs 9.43% +/- 2.61%, P =.004) compared with control. Subsequently, the rate of apoptotic CECs expressing ROCK was significantly lower in cells exposed to ROCK inhibitor compared with cells that were not (19.01% +/- 4.17 vs 30.42% +/- 4.27, P <.001). Conclusions: ROCK inhibitor reduced endothelial cell loss in vitro and might be used to limit or slow CEC loss in donor corneal tissue during eye banking. This might be a promising new method for promoting future graft survival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]