Proceedings of the Eighth Annual Conference of the National Council for Jewish Education

Research about Jewish choral singers provides insight to a previously unstudied population of adult Jewish learners. Drawing on over 2,000 responses to the First-Ever Survey of Jewish Choral Activity, this article describes how Jewish choral experiences enable adults to deepen their involvement in Jewish life and learning. Survey results suggest that participants in Jewish choral groups resemble secular singers in terms of social, identity, and skill development, but derive additional benefits in terms of Jewish Peoplehood, Jewish Competence, Spirituality, and Jewish Community. Jewish choral activities particularly benefit singers under 45 by providing them opportunities to integrate their Jewish and musical lives.     

Population differences in constructive memory

An experiment was conducted to evaluate constructive memory in fourth-grade low-SES black and middle-SES white children. The children were read nine short passages; each passage was composed of two premise statements and a filler sentence. The children were tested by a recognition procedure. Thirty-six test sentences were presented randomly. Four sentences were associated with each passage (true premise, false premise, true inference, and false inference). Subjects were asked to make yes/no recognition decisions based on whether the test sentence was identical to a sentence presented at study. Middle-SES white children made few errors, except to true inference test sentences. This pattern of performance is consistent with the constructive view of memory. Low-SES black children also had a high error rate to true inference items. However, this outcome may not reflect constructive memory because they also had a high error rate to some of the other types of test sentences.     

Development of social categories and stereotypes in early childhood: The case of “The Arab” concept formation, stereotype and attitudes by Jewish children in Israel

Stereotypes, which are based on the categorization process, are learned. Children first acquire a category of a social group and subsequently attribute characteristics to the group (i.e., form a stereotype). This paper illuminates the development of stereotypes among young children on the basis of cognitive theories of conceptual development. Specifically, several studies investigating the concept formation of “the Arab” among Jewish children in Israel are reported. These studies concern the five following research questions: When do children acquire the concept “an Arab”? On what basis do children form the concept “an Arab”? How do children understand the concept “an Arab”? What is the affective meaning of the concept “an Arab”? What is the visual image of “an Arab” in the minds of children? The results of the reported studies show that children acquire the word and the concept “an Arab” very early. From the beginning, even though little knowledge is associated with the concept, it has negative connotations. Young children described Arabs mostly by referring to violent and aggressive behaviors, and the characterization was unidimensional. These results demonstrate the strength of the Israeli cultural stereotype of Arabs and its influence on young children on the one hand, and show the general principles of category and stereotype development, on the other.