Teaching Objectives in Chemistry: a Comparison of Teachers’ and Students’ Priorities

Summaries

English

An inventory which consisted of 12 objectives of chemistry teaching was constructed from lists compiled from the responses of 12th‐grade students and given to 10th, 11th and 12th graders and to their teachers. All four groups were asked to rank the objectives according to their order of significance.

The analysis of the order of rankings gives an insight into what are considered as the most important and interesting aspects of chemistry by students and by teachers.

The use of an objectives questionnaire in this manner is recommended to curriculum developers as part of the process of development and implementation of any curriculum. This may help to make the subject matter more suitable for the needs of both students and teachers.     

GOLEM,FROM PRAGUE TO CYBERSPACE: THE USE OF CSCL IN CULTURAL EDUCATION FOR DIASPORAS

In this paper we describe and theorize about a computer‐supported and mediated educational research project which encourages cultural production and sustainability. We first describe the CD‐Golem project which was developed in light of the perceived needs of a Diaspora community's attempts to impart its youth with a sense of belonging and continuity. Next we characterize Cultural Education and discuss the theoretical rationale of our approach in the context of current theories of identity and cultural construction, multicultural education and computer‐supported collaborative learning. We conclude by reviewing briefly and evaluating critically some of the lessons we have learned in our first years of activity.     

TRADITIONAL VERSUS HISTORICAL APPROACH IN THE TEACHING OF THE BIBLE

This article describes results from interviews with Jewish teenagers about the tension between adherence to tradition and commitment to egalitarianism in relation to issues like women in the rabbinate, women wearing ritual garments like kipot and talitot, and gender separation at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. For many teens, egalitarian values trumped traditional objections to female rabbis and other forms of participation in synagogue life in America; however, they were more hesitant to challenge gender separation at the Kotel in Israel, where the purported antiquity and authenticity of Orthodox tradition is more readily accepted.     

Learning from Failure: A Case Study of Where an Extracurricular Science Program Went Wrong

This article re-examines the learning environment in an after-school science program for socio-economically disadvantaged children, attempting to discover why the particular group we studied failed to make significant progress between pre and post program testing, while other groups undergoing the same program elsewhere succeeded. Data composed of in class observations, students’ class workbooks and perceptive/cognitive interviews was analyzed qualitatively to construct a picture of the learning environment as experienced by both the students and their student teacher, Liora. Our primary finding revealed a striking dissonance between the program’s student-centered theory (based on the tenets of social-constructivism) and the classroom reality enforced by Liora, who ran the lessons primarily as a monologue that left very little room for active student participation. This disparity was further complicated by an ambiguity in Liora’s position as an authority figure, wherein she wavered between her predilection for a rigid, authoritative teaching environment and a desire to be her students’ friend and confidante.     

Chabad Tracks the Trekkers: Jewish Education in India

Fundamentalists and modernists seem, at times, to work in contrapuntal interdependency. While the fundamentalist's rhetoric markets its image as celebrating the renewal of an authentic past identity in modernity, modernists state the need for and possibility of adapting a cherished past to modern assumptions. Yet, it seems as if it is the fundamentalists who are the ones to embrace a highly modern narrative and that it is the modernists who oppose it. In this article, we investigate this paradox by portraying the educational efforts of the Chabad Movement to introduce young Israeli trekkers in Southeast Asia, from secular, Zionist backgrounds, into a religious lifestyle. We show Chabad's strategies to be what, in modernist jargon, would be considered progressive informal educational activities, the very ones from which modernists seem to be retreating with the advance of Jewish day school educational technologies in the Diaspora. We suggest that the Chabad movement demonstrates an understanding of the covert symbolic power of formal educational approaches and that it resists them by enacting a radical epistemological change in all that guides their educational activity.     

Figuring out what works: learning and engaging with ideas about evolution within integrated informal learning environments

Instructional Science - Informal learning environments can be a fun and effective means of introducing visitors to a variety of topics in evolution. Our study examined 120 sixth-grade...     

The politics of mourning in Cyprus and Israel: educational implications

This paper suggests the need for a critical analysis of the nationalization of mourning and its educational implications, especially in conflict‐ridden areas. Our thoughts are grounded in a comparative study on mourning that has been conducted as part of our long‐standing ethnographic research in schools in Cyprus and Israel during the last 10 years. Through this study on mourning, we highlight two ideas. First, we want to show how a comparison of our studies in Cyprus and Israel highlights the difficulties for alternative interpretations to be translated into educational policies and teacher practices in the absence of changes in political structures. Second, we want to show that despite the forces that nationalize mourning, there are educational openings for alternative interpretations about mourning and the encouragement of reconciliation pedagogies. To this end, the education literature on teaching controversial issues and examples of pedagogies for reconciliation might be relevant to provide concrete ideas for education theory, policy and practice on issues of mourning.     

Switching-Type Servosystems in an Elementary Undergraduate Curriculum

The paper discusses how the concept of switchingtype servosystems can be introduced into an undergraduate curriculum without requiring a more advanced background in mathematics on the part of the student than is ordinarily expected. A differential equation approach is used to study the response of a second-order system which is excited with a step function input. The system starts to respond in a linear mode of operation with an over-all positive feedback and switches into a different linear mode with an over-all negative feedback at a predetermined instant. The system is designed so as to respond with no overshoot. The response time is shorter than that of a conventional critically-damped linear negative feedback system with the same major physical components. The results of a rigorous study by means of a phase-space representation are also given.