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.)

Information on marine debris along the Mediterranean coast of Israel, especially on the seafloor, is limited. Many recreational divers are enthusiasts of marine conservation and can thus contribute to data collection which does not require highly specialized training. The Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel together with The Israeli Diving Federation established the diver volunteer program "Sea Guard" ("Mishmar Hayam" in Hebrew), which supports marine conservation through citizen science. The divers were trained in marine ecology and survey methods to conduct independent surveys and lead underwater cleanups. For the first time, we have described the patterns of benthic debris density and composition in the nearshore environment of the southeastern part of the Mediterranean Sea. We found that benthic marine debris in the nearshore along the Israeli Mediterranean coast is primarily plastic, likely originating from the use of local beaches. Fishing, boating and domestic activities also play an important role as sources for marine debris. The currents' regime prevented the debris from accumulating on the seafloor in the nearshore environment, with the exception of several "debris traps". Our findings will be useful for the development of programs to improve coastal waste management. • Many recreational SCUBA divers care for the marine environment and can contribute to data collection with minimal training. • Benthic marine debris data were collected from underwater cleanups organized by the Israeli Diving Federation since 2015. • Citizen science underwater surveys in Israel are done by trained volunteers in framework of divers' "Sea Guard" program. • Citizen science activities revealed patterns of benthic debris density and composition in the nearshore environment. • Benthic marine debris along the Israeli coast is primarily plastic, likely originating from local beach recreational use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Satisfaction derived from purchases can affect one's happiness and quality of life. Previous studies illustrated that this effect is not equal across purchase categories. Specifically, experiential purchases were found to bring more satisfaction and happiness to consumers than material purchases. However, these comparison studies treated a variety of experiential purchases as one homogeneous category regardless of their nature of consumption. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to bridge this gap and to assess the difference in the level of satisfaction among the three purchase categories: material, travel (composite event experiential purchases), and nontravel experiential purchases (single event experiential purchases). Moreover, this study attempted to ascertain the consistency of these differences across several purchases of each category. By analyzing the satisfaction derived from past actual purchases of 282 participants it was found that respondents were more satisfied with past travel purchases than both past nontravel experiential purchases, and past material purchases. In addition, this study found differences between US and Israeli samples regarding purchase satisfaction derived from the three categories. Lastly, this study also discovered that the price paid for purchases in each of the three categories did not have an effect on the derived satisfaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aimed to reveal the occupational self-perceptions of rank-and-file employees in the Israeli hotel industry. Due to the exploratory nature of the study a qualitative research approach was adopted. The findings are based on 40 semistructured interviews with current and former Israeli hotel employees. The results revealed that almost all participants had disconcerting negative perceptions of rank-and-file occupations in the Israeli hotel industry. The themes emerged as relevant to the understanding of employees' occupational self-perception were classified into four groups: working conditions, occupational profile, job characteristics and requirements, and moderating factors linked with the reputation of the hotel and hospitality industry as a work environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Asymmetry of power is an acknowledged phenomenon in negotiation, and there are a number of devices for dealing with it. Similarly, alternative dispute resolution seeks to neutralize asymmetry of power by using an interest-based model of cross-conflict collaboration, but research has indicated that asymmetry persists nonetheless. The role of gender in negotiation has been researched, and to a far lesser degree, also with regard to alternative dispute resolution. Some of the gender in negotiation research has introduced the element of asymmetry of power as well. Prompted by the highlighting of asymmetry in Israeli-Palestinian all-women alternative dispute resolution (cross-conflict collaboration), the present article seeks to determine the role of gender, comparing asymmetry in mixed groups with all-women's groups. A qualitative analysis, based on observations over decades of personal experience, finds only differences of degree rather than essence between predominantly-male mixed and all-women's groups regarding the effects of asymmetry. The major exception to this lies in the centrality accorded the phenomenon by women but not by men, possibly attributable to gender differences in group relations and also the feminist character of the all-female groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The paper examines the relationships between first-time vs. repeat visitors to a highly volatile destination in terms of destination risk perceptions, risk reduction strategies and motivation for the visit. The exploratory research question centers on possible differences in tourist behavioral profiles associated with their decision to visit a foreign destination again. Set in Israel, a highly volatile tourist destination, researchers interviewed 760 international tourists using a questionnaire classifying them as either first-time or repeat visitors. Discriminant analysis revealed that first-time visitors were characterized by human-induced risk, socio-psychological risk, food safety and weather risk. In contrast, repeat visitors were associated with the destination risk factors of financial risk, service quality risk, natural disasters and car accidents. First-time vs. repeat visitors were also compared and contrasted in terms of risk reduction strategies such as consulting with people who had previously visited specific destinations and gathering information from travel agents. Differences between first-time and repeat visitors were also found regarding motivations for the visit. Similar analyses were conducted on the three sub-groups of repeat visitors, classified in terms of number of visits. The various destination risk factors, risk reduction strategies and motivation within the different segments serve as a basis for recommending marketing strategies aimed at attracting potential tourists to highly volatile destinations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]