ABSTRACT:In the new biology-learning curriculum for Israeli high schools, known as Biomind, students experience "open-inquiry." This paper describes a qualitative action research project that was performed in order to investigate the characteristics of the open inquiry learning process. Specifically, the research investigates this process in terms of the concepts of evidence, affective aspects, and other aspects that may emerge by following the open inquiry process. This paper also discusses how the findings from the open inquiry process can be used for further curriculum improvement.This research characterized the open inquiry as a dynamic inquiry learning process. The main criteria for characterizing the dynamic inquiry are learning as a process, changes occurring during the research, procedural understanding, and affective points of view. The paper further suggests methods of documenting the dynamic inquiry process. This documentation can assist in understanding the inquiry process from both the cognitive and metacognitive points of view. The educational and research processes described here contributed both to improving the curriculum and to establishing an infrastructure through which the science education community can emphasize dynamic aspects of science in open inquiry learning.
PurposeThis research aims to examine the impact of job stress on the organizational commitment of a random, representative sample of coordinators in the Israeli educational mentoring organization PMP. Organizational commitment, including affective, continuance and normative commitment, refers to worker relations in the organization, and how these relations influence the employee's well‐being, behavior and contribution to the organization.Design/methodology/approachThe study used three questionnaires to investigate the influence of the stress variable and its cumulative effects to predict the coordinators' organizational commitment, among 131 PMP coordinators from six different PMP branches around Israel.FindingsThe findings revealed that stress hinders the coordinators' sense of emotional commitment. As the stress level rises, the coordinators' sense of belonging decreases. Another finding was that the stress in the coordinators' job does not influence their overall continuance commitment. Strong continuance commitment was found in two categories: role expectations that were not compatible with the role requirements, and the second, unwillingness to leave the job in the middle of the year. In addition, the research indicated that job stress is not related to the PMP coordinators' normative commitment. They felt loyalty to the organization based on the faith that this work is the right thing to do.Originality/valueThe importance of the research lies in the highlighting of stress as an essential factor influencing work and performance in organizations, together with the mitigating influence of organizational commitment. These results could help organizations to better understand the influence of organizational commitment and to manage its implications more effectively. It is suggested that further research should investigate whether those working in educational settings have greater normative commitment than workers in other fields.
In recent years, the ability to re ect has been considered an important competency that teachers should acquire during teacher training and implement in teaching throughout their professional lives. Thus there is the need during teacher training to assess student teachers' developing re ective abilities. This article describes a two-dimensional framework by which student teachers' written re ections may be assessed. One dimension is the object of writing (content), and the second is the form of writing. This evaluative tool was developed and applied during a one-semester teacher-training course. During each week of the course, students were required to submit a personal document concerning the previous lesson, including their thoughts, feelings, hesitations, questions, links to previously learned issues and to relevant papers, and associations between the learned material and the students' experiences as students and as teachers. Assessments were carried out on the re ective writings of a sample of 20 students, at different points in time. The evaluative framework was found to offer a tool sensitive enough to explain all the students' various re ective statements. Results showed a change over time in the form of writing, but not the content. Most students' re ections progressed from the descriptive form to a more deliberative form that we called "critical bridging". In this article, these results are expanded upon, their implications discussed and illustrative examples given of all twelve cells of the evaluative framework.
This article focuses on the methodological challenges in one interview of the 60 in-depth interviews that comprise a research study of Israeli Druze currently underway. The study is being conducted by a pair of researchers, one a Canadian living in Israel, an English and Hebrew speaker, and one an Israeli Druze woman, a Hebrew and Arabic speaker. The interview examined here involves two interviewers, two interviewees, three languages and at least two cultural frameworks. The analysis treats the interview as an intrinsic case in order to expose the various contexts of the interview and how they affect the construction of meaning in this complex research situation.
This article presents a model for religious education based on three central elements. First, it is argued that religious experience, or direct experience of the Divine, is an essential part of a full religious life, that religious experience is based in, enabled by and examined against, the body of knowledge in a given religion, and that religious experience is itself a form of knowing. Second, it is suggested that there be three sets of aims in religious education curriculum: knowledge aims, moral value aims and spiritual aims, the last of which encompasses religious experience, which religious education should aim to encourage and facilitate among students. Third, the teacher is presented as the central factor in such facilitation, and the pedagogical and personal characteristics of this ideal teacher are described.
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