Background: The ability to think analogically is central to the process of learning and understanding reality and there is a broad consensus among researchers that we can improve this ability. Immigrants who have emigrated from developing to developed countries tend to experience tremendous challenges in their early years as immigrants. Their…

Children with mental retardation have pronounced difficulties in using cognitive strategies and comprehending abstract concepts--among them, the concept of sequential time (Van-Handel, Swaab, De-Vries, & Jongmans, 2007). The perception of sequential time is generally tested by using scenarios presenting a continuum of actions. The goal of this…

Letter names play an important role in early literacy. Previous studies of letter name learning have examined the Latin alphabet. The current study tested learners of Hebrew, comparing their patterns of performance and types of errors with those of English learners. We analyzed letter-naming data from 645 Israeli children who had not begun formal…

This document reports on a series of visual scanning studies done with Israeli preschoolers and kindergartners to resolve issues related to diagnostic test and instructional materials design. The first study assessed the effect of item content on error rate. Three multiple-choice tests, differing only in item content, were given to 38…

Findings of this Israeli study suggest that perception is affected by lables, learning, and selective attention; that these effects are determined developmentally; and that as age increases, the effects of verbal cues diminish, while the effects of perceptual cues increase. (Author/DLS)

Israeli Arab- and Jewish-educated children were given perceptual exploration tasks to test the effects of language on directionality in reading and writing habits. (Author/SS)