Situational and Personal Causes of Student Cheating

The causes of students’ academic dishonesty behavior were explored using survey and experimental vignette methods. Participants were surveyed about their own cheating behavior, neutralizing attitudes, performance/mastery orientation and perceptions of peer attitudes and behavior. As predicted, neutralizing attitudes influenced cheating behavior directly, but also indirectly, increasing the effect of individual attitudes. Observing others cheating was strongly correlated with one’s own cheating behavior. These variables are also shown to have different effects on exam cheating and plagiarism and cases of giving and receiving unauthorized information. Correlations were tested using experimental vignette methods, which supported the claims made from survey data.     

Friend or Foe? Perceptions of Qatar in the Israeli Online General and Sports Press

The current paper is looking into the way in which Qatar’s investment in sport, both directly and indirectly, is being perceived by the Israeli press. In order to accomplish the task set above, a content analysis of Qatar’s media coverage in the Israeli online press was conducted. Our analysis includes 1199 articles appearing in the mainstream online Israeli press and the findings point out to an interesting trend; there are significant differences between sport related stories, which present a political context and those who do not deal with politics which are significantly more supportive of Qatar.     

Role-based Association of Verbs,Actions, and Sentiments with Entities in Political Discourse

A crucial challenge in measuring how text represents an entity is the need to associate each representative expression with a relevant entity to generate meaningful results. Common solutions to this problem are usually based on proximity methods that require a large corpus to reach reasonable levels of accuracy. We show how such methods for the association between an entity and a representation yield a high percentage of false positives at the expression level and low validity at the document level. We introduce a solution that combines syntactic parsing, semantic role labeling logic, and a machine learning approach—the role-based association method. To test our method, we compared it with prevalent methods of association on the news coverage of two entities of interest—the State of Israel and the Palestinian Authority. We found that the role-based association method is more accurate at the expression and the document levels.     

Developmental Relations Among Behavioral Inhibition,Anxiety, and Attention Biases to Threat and Positive Information

This study examined relations between behavioral inhibition (BI) assessed in toddlerhood (n = 268) and attention biases (AB) to threat and positive faces and maternal‐reported anxiety assessed when children were 5‐ and 7‐year‐old. Results revealed that BI predicted anxiety at age 7 in children with AB toward threat, away from positive, or with no bias, at age 7; BI did not predict anxiety for children displaying AB away from threat or toward positive. Five‐year AB did not moderate the link between BI and 7‐year anxiety. No direct association between AB and BI or anxiety was detected; moreover, children did not show stable AB across development. These findings extend our understanding of the developmental links among BI, AB, and anxiety.     

Just for Sport!? Sport,Gambling and Politics in Israel

By adopting a developmental approach, this essay describes and analyses the key processes that led to the establishment and institutionalization of sports gambling in Israel. The socio-historic examination of these processes (1951–1971) suggests that sports gambling in Israel was primarily designed to satisfy a convergence of political interests among governmental decision-makers, leaders of sports institutions and powerful private entrepreneurs.     

Raman crystal lasers in the visible and near-infrared

Raman lasers based on potassium gadolinium tungstate and lead tungstate crystals pumped bya≈120 ps Nd: YAG laser at 1.064 μm were developed. High reflection mirrors for the Stokes wavelength have been used to generate near-infrared and eye safe spectral region of 1.15–1.32 μm. Second harmonic generation of the generated Raman lasers was observed. Eifficient multiple Stokes and anti-Stokes picosecond generation in 64 crystals have been shown to exhibit stimulated Raman scattering on about 700 lines covering the whole visible and near-infrared spectrum. All stimulated Raman scattering (SRS) wavelengths in the visible and near-infrared spectrum are identified and attributed to the SRS-active vibration modes of these crystals.     

Can we administer the scholarship of teaching? Lessons from outstanding professors in higher education

Boyer’s call for the study of the “scholarship of teaching” has rekindled interest in outstanding teaching in higher education. However, most studies of teaching quality and student experiences in higher education have paid little attention to intense, meaningful key experiences and were limited in answering the pertinent question: Can universities administer excellent instruction? The current paper attempts to answer this question by providing exploratory evidence of key experiences in higher education. It is based on evidence from a large qualitative study of such episodes, using retrospective accounts provided by adults who speak about their best educational experiences in higher education. The results are grouped under three major thematic headings. The first describes the centrality of personalized student–teacher relations. The second focuses on the ways in which identification and integrity provided students with models to emulate; and the third tells of excellence in the skills of teaching. These results point that the administration of the scholarship of teaching is an intricate endeavor.     

Feedback seeking in children and adolescents: associations with self-perceptions,attachment representations,and depression

Because the feedback children and adolescents receive is important to their development, 2 experimental studies were designed to examine children's (M = 12 years) and adolescents' (M = 17 years) active selection of the quality of feedback they wish to receive. In both studies evidence emerged that participants' self-perceptions influence their feedback seeking. Participants with positive self-perceptions sought more positive feedback than participants with negative self-perceptions and sought more positive feedback than expected by chance. Participants with negative self-perceptions lacked this tendency to seek positive feedback and sometimes sought less positive feedback than expected by chance. As expected, depression and attachment-related measures were also associated with participants' feedback seeking. Contributions of feedback-seeking patterns to stability and change in children's and adolescents' development are discussed.     

School Organization and Market Ecology: a realist sociological look at the infrastructure of school choice

Programs of school choice are based largely on the idea of a free market’. Recent reform efforts have been based on the assumption that market‐driven educational systems would bring higher achievement levels and greater satisfaction among clients. According to popular views, parents would shop for a school just as they do for any other commodity and competition between schools would ensue, with each school trying to improve itself thereby attracting consumers. There is a major drawback to this reasoning. Markets are rarely completely free from regulation and control, and the desires of individuals do not fully explain the social facts of school choice. As a complement to current school choice studies, a structural explanation of school choice within the theory of network analysis is presented. The study analyses choice in terms of inter‐school student transfers and explains choice as the combined result of two factors. The first is the organization of student mobility in schools, in terms of vacant positions (timing and volume) and student body composition, which posits nine ideal types of school organization. The second factor is the ecology of the market, given in the number of schools in each type. Research conducted in a large city in Israel serves as an example for the approach. The more general implications of the study suggest directions for the theoretical refinement of mobility and attainment studies in sociology.