City doctors: A systemic approach to transform Colon City,Panama

A project for the president and minister of tourism of Panama was designed to transform (not change or tinker with) the City of Colon. Colon is the second largest city in Panama and the eastern entrance to the Panama Canal, and it is a city in crisis, with high crime and a low standard of living for most citizens, which is teetering on the edge of community collapse. Applying the concepts and tools of Mega thinking and planning, and using the Bernardez two‐level business case, it has been shown how the entire city could be transformed with a positive return on investment in the first year.     

Sound Stuff? Naïve materialism in middle‐school students’ conceptions of sound

Few studies have dealt with students’ preconceptions of sounds. The current research employs Reiner et al. (2000 Reiner, M., Slotta, J. D., Chi, M. T. H. and Resnick, L. B. 2000. Naïve physics reasoning: A commitment to substance‐based conceptions. Cognition and Instruction, 18(1): 1–34. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) substance schema to reveal new insights about students’ difficulties in understanding this fundamental topic. It aims not only to detect whether the substance schema is present in middle school students’ thinking, but also examines how students use the schema’s properties. It asks, moreover, whether the substance schema properties are used as islands of local consistency or whether one can identify more global coherent consistencies among the properties that the students use to explain the sound phenomena. In‐depth standardized open‐ended interviews were conducted with ten middle school students. Consistent with the substance schema, sound was perceived by our participants as being pushable, frictional, containable, or transitional. However, sound was also viewed as a substance different from the ordinary with respect to its stability, corpuscular nature, additive properties, and inertial characteristics. In other words, students’ conceptions of sound do not seem to fit Reiner et al.’s schema in all respects. Our results also indicate that students’ conceptualization of sound lack internal consistency. Analyzing our results with respect to local and global coherence, we found students’ conception of sound is close to diSessa’s “loosely connected, fragmented collection of ideas.” The notion that sound is perceived only as a “sort of a material,” we believe, requires some revision of the substance schema as it applies to sound. The article closes with a discussion concerning the implications of the results for instruction.     

School-Based Management as a Factor in School Effectiveness

Advocates of a policy of greater autonomy for schools in the public education system argue that such a policy makes for more effective schools. This article, based on a study carried out in Israel, examines how important the autonomy factor is in influencing school effectiveness as measured by such criteria as teachers' sense of motivation and commitment to the school. While welcoming the trend towards greater autonomy for schools, the author argues that further research is needed before we can formulate any theory concerning the relationship between school autonomy and school effectiveness.     

Kirkpatrick plus: Evaluation and continuous improvement with a community focus

For almost 40 years, Donald Kirkpatrick's framework for evaluation has been used as a basic model for the identification and targeting of training-specific interventions in business, government, military, and industry alike. By approaching evaluation from four different perspectives—reaction, learning, behavior, and results—the model has provided a solid basis for the examination of training's impact on the organization. Despite the current practice of measuring one's success according to the success of one's clients, proposed changes in the model have not been frequently adopted. It is therefore likely time for professionals to reevaluate the utility and responsiveness of the Kirk-patrick framework to meet the value-added requirements of today's organizations. This article identifies tools and concepts for being responsive to the new organizational realities not originally addressed by the Kirkpatrick model.     

Do normal children have “flat”; ability profiles?

Scatter on the five specific scales in the McCarthy was examined for the standardization sample to explore the types of ability profiles exhibited by normal children. Contrary to the common stereotype of “flat” profiles, normal children aged 21/2 to 81/2 years evidenced much variability in their performance on the various cognitive and motor dimensions.     

On Being a Sports Historian in Israel

Abstract

The article discusses the way I came to be a sports historian in Israel and the status of the history of sports in the State of Israel over the years.     

Investigation of the WISC-R for use with retarded children: Correlation with the 1972 Stanford-Binet and comparison of WISC and WISC-R profiles

A group of 80 mentally retarded youngsters, aged 6 to 16, was tested on the WISC-R, primarily to assess the continuity of measurement between the old and new WISCs. The WISC-R IQs correlated .65 to .82 with Stanford-Binet IQ for a subsample of 45 children, resembling the coefficients between the 1949 WISC and the Binet for retarded groups. In addition, the WISC-R test profiles for the 80 children corresponded closely to the WISC test profiles for many retarded samples. Thus, there was evidence to support the continuity of the WISC-R with its predecessor for retarded populations.     

Do parents,teachers, and psychoeducational evaluators agree in their perceptions of the problems of black and white emotionally disturbed children?

The aim was to examine the agreement among parents, teachers, psychologists, and educational diagnosticians in their perceptions of the problem behaviors of emotionally disturbed children. The sample of 194 emotionally disturbed boys and girls included 129 whites and 65 blacks. The use of measures of relationship showed that there was significantly greater consensus among the raters in perceptions of white than of black children; agreement was particularly poor between parents and teachers of black youngsters. The implications of these findings are discussed.