A private matter? Religious education and democracy in Indonesia and Israel

The article examines state-supported religious education and its consequences for civic attitudes in Indonesia and Israel, two democracies that grant religion a prominent place in the public sphere, particularly in education. The comparison reveals that while in Indonesia the state was able to gradually introduce a secular curriculum in religious schools and establish an accreditation system by which it could exert influence on the way religion is taught, in Israel, by contrast, state-funded religious schools over time became increasingly opposed to a mandatory ‘core curriculum’ of general studies. The comparison further suggests that in Indonesia the inclusion of a secular curriculum in religious schools in the 1970s should be seen as one of the factors promoting the production and dissemination of ‘rationalist approaches to religion’ and brought religious actors on board of democratisation, while in Israel the exclusion of a secular curriculum from religious schooling has undermined civic commitments among ultra-Orthodox Jewish citizens and as such weakened Israeli democracy. The article is based on public opinion data, data from the Ministries of Religion and Education, and court decisions in both countries.     

Student' Strategic Actions in Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning

Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) can be a powerful tool in creating learning communities in which students have a chance to construct knowledge collaboratively and to develop explanations of the subject to be studied. It is obvious, however, that collaborative inquiry is a cognitively-challenging task for an individual student. More evidence on the nature and quality of students' actions and strategic processes in CSCL is needed to make these models more applicable in different domains of classroom learning. The aim of this study was to analyse students' strategic actions in Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning. Eighteen secondary school students, ages 13–14 years, participated in CSCL inquiries in their literature class. The networked technology environment used was CSILE. The students had three inquiry-based CSCL projects, each lasting for six weeks. The data-collection procedures used were questionnaires, students' written computer notes and repeated process-oriented interviews. The results show the dominance of a superficial approach toward inquiry. This is evidenced by the students' fact-oriented computer notes and their self-reported, surface-level strategic actions. However, the results show a growing amount of collaborative discussion in the networked database. Collaborative networked discussions manifest an increase in deeper-level cognitive strategies and progressive student inquiries. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

College application behavior: who is strategic? Does it help?

The paper examines whether college application behavior assists members of privileged social groups to preserve their advantages in diversified higher education systems. The study is based on a survey conducted in Israel in 1999 on a sample of 4,061 freshmen in the research universities and the academic colleges, which are often perceived as the second tier of higher education. The findings show that strategic application behavior helps less able children of academic parents to achieve the summit of higher education: studying lucrative fields of study at the research universities. Mizrachim, the disadvantaged Jewish ethnic group, are strategic when applying for lucrative fields of study, but it does not affect their actual enrollment. Strategic application behavior helps Arabs, the most disadvantaged group in Israel, increase their odds of achieving the “worst” option, studying non-lucrative fields in colleges. Talented women successfully practice strategic behavior when applying for lucrative fields of study. The effects of strategic application behavior are, thus, mixed. It helps in preserving socio-economic and ethnic inequalities, but also helps in reducing gender inequality among talented students.

Human-material relationships in environmental and sustainability education – an empirical study of a school embroidery project

In recent discussions about the widening and opening up of anthropocentric perspectives in environmental and sustainability education (ESE) research, a recurrent issue has been what reasonably could be a subject of inquiry and an agent of knowledge. This article aims to showcase an empirical study of the relevance of human-material relationships in crafting learning processes by following an embroidery project with year 8 students in the Swedish craft subject of educational sloyd. How the human-material correspondence unfolds in the crafting learning process is analysed with the aid of Ingold’s practice of correspondence and Sørensen’s notion of participation, performance and imagination. Rather than assuming that materials contribute to certain environmental and sustainability aims, the analysis empirically demonstrates how the human-material correspondence unfolds. The analysis identifies three human-material relationships: attuning, troubling and tracing correspondence. Drawing on the findings, the human-material relevance for environmental and sustainability education and research is further discussed.     

Effects of stimulant medication on learning in children with ADHD

It is well established that stimulant medication improves classroom manageability and attention in terms of time on task, but does stimulant medication improve learning or long-term academic achievement in children with ADHD? There is no clear evidence that it does, but there are at least two reasons why beneficial effects may be obscured in research studies and clinical practice: (1) Higher-than-optimal doses may be prescribed if behavioral response (rather than cognitive response) is used to titrate the dose, and (2) treatment may be overinclusive if diagnostic groups are targeted in which a significant proportion of cases do not have favorable cognitive responses to medication. This article addresses these two issues and describes a large clinical series of patients who were evaluated using a double-blind medication assessment protocol designed to overcome some of the theoretical deficiencies suggested by these issues.