This study explores the potential of empowering children as peace agents through education by using the case of the TEC4Schools program. The program is based on Allport's Contact Theory and promotes prolonged exposure to the 'other' culture among culturally diverse groups of students. It is based on the hypothesis that extended contact periods…

The study aims to examine changes over time in school victimization and climate in Israel, and whether these changes varied between Jewish and Arab schools and schools with different SES. A secondary analysis of the Ministry of Education database of structured student surveys regarding victimization and climate, was conducted during 2008-2019. All…

Using an original data set of task-based interviews, this paper presents findings on how Jewish day school students make sense of Biblical Hebrew verses in Biblical Hebrew. This paper pushes back against the convention in Jewish communal discourse to evaluate and label knowledge, shifting the focus instead to understanding how knowledge is…

The Feuerstein Instrumental Enrichment (FIE) Program is a process-oriented program based on "Structural Cognitive Modifiability and Mediated Learning Experience" (SCM-MLE) theory. It is aimed at promoting learning how to learn, development of deficient cognitive functions, problem-solving strategies and metacognitive abilities. The FIE…

This paper reports on a study that examined a Shared Education program recently implemented in Israel based on the Northern Ireland model. Sixth-grade children from two schools -- one Jewish and one Arab, who study in separate education systems and have very limited contacts with one another -- met to learn English (as an additional language)…

Immersion in fiction narratives like Alan Gratz's (2017) "Refugee" can help students recognize and acknowledge our common humanity when discussed in a dialogic classroom using a critical literacy pedagogy. Following the literature on using novel discussions to help students understand pressing societal issues (e.g., Boas, 2012; Hsieh,…

This paper presents an ethnographic study analyzing the influence of students' social backgrounds on students' entitlement and agency in relation to floor rights. Classroom interactions were video-recorded, and interviews were conducted in a socially diverse fifth-grade in Israel. Descriptive statistics and micro-analyses of participation patterns…

Oslo Accords have stringently underscored that both rivalries, the Palestinians and the Israelis, must abstain from incitement to terror and violence. Their educational systems, consequently, have to refrain from convulsive, fundamentalist, and heinous skirmishes leading to stalled reconciliation. History school textbooks are deemed, from both…

This article examines the participatory impact of a storytelling project on a small group of Latinx English learners in a sixth grade classroom. The storytelling project unexpectedly emerged as a positive ripple effect from a Participatory Action Research (PAR) initiative to foster civic empowerment among middle school students in an English…

This study investigated the voices of students interpreting Hebrew Bible texts in one fourth-grade classroom. Through think-alouds on the Biblical text with each student, exit interviews, teacher interviews, and classroom observations, this study found that those students whose interpretive stances were more aligned with the teacher's were given…

This study evaluated the efficacy of a newly developed Arab-Jewish Class Exchange Program (CEP) in reducing stereotyping and prejudicial attitudes between Israeli-Jewish and Israeli-Palestinian children. The CEP builds on the core principles of contact theory and is designed to help participants cultivate empathy and tolerance toward the other.…

This study contributes to the investigation of the variability of the schooling effect on cognitive development between educational systems and its underlying factors, by focusing on 3 cases differing in the characteristics assumed to affect the magnitude of the schooling effect (the quality of the schooling and students' mean ability to benefit…

The purpose of this paper is to exemplify a "grass-roots" change based on Dewey's experimental progressive education model employed in the "Bridge over the Valley" bilingual school, a Palestinian-Arab and Jewish school in Israel. In order to identify the progressive "approach" underlying this change, the…

Private tutoring (PT) is becoming a worldwide phenomenon. In Israel too, about a third of elementary school students participate in PT. Based on sociological and school quality considerations, we examined school characteristics that are associated with PT intensity at school. The data encompassed a random state wide sample of 389 Israeli…

Gender differences in mathematics have been of particular interest over the past decades. Research has shown a disparity in mathematical proficiency between boys and girls depending on the area of mathematics tested, the age and grade of the student, and the structure of the test question (i.e., how the question is posed). Although, much of the…