Ely Kozminsky

The effect of voluntary dehydration on cognitive functions of elementary school children

Aims: (1) To describe the occurrence of voluntary dehydration in two classes of elementary school students as expressed by their morning and noon‐time urine osmolality; and (2) to determine the relationship between the childrens scores on cognitive tests and their state of hydration.

The effects of early phonological awareness training on reading success

Abstract This longitudinal study establishes predictive and causal relationships between pre-reading phonological awareness (PA) and reading success in first and third grades. Seventy students from two kindergarten classes, who subsequently registered in the same elementary school, were studied. The experimental class received an eight-month PA training program. Phonological awareness was measured at three points of time: pre-training, end of kindergarten and end of first grade and reading comprehension was assessed at the end of the first and third grades. A significant difference in PA skills was found between groups at the end of the kindergarten year. A comparison of reading comprehension scores, controlling for the pre-training PA scores, yielded significant differences for the experimental group in both first and third grades. The phonological awareness tasks of initial phoneme isolation and sound deletion were highly predictive of success in first-grade reading acquisition.

How Do General Knowledge and Reading Strategies Ability Relate to Reading Comprehension of High School Students at Different Educational Levels

The study examines the relationship between general knowledge, skills in applying reading strategies, and reading comprehension for ninth-grade students at varying educational levels: academic, semi-academic, vocational and learning disabilities. Two hundred and five students received a battery of tests evaluating their general knowledge, skills in applying four reading strategies (summary, self-questioning, clarification and prediction), and two reading comprehension tests. The findings revealed differential contributions of general knowledge and strategy application to reading comprehension. Compared with the academic students, semi-academics have deficient strategic skills. Vocational students, in addition to deficient strategic skills, have poor general knowledge, which further impedes their reading comprehension. The deficiency of students with learning disabilities goes beyond these two components. These results led us to recommend different foci of comprehension intervention for each group.

The Differential Effects of Prior Knowledge on Learning: A Study of Two Consecutive Courses in Earth Sciences.

We studied the occurrence and nature of learningin a university first year Introduction toGeomorphology course, and its relations with priorknowledge taught in a prerequisite course, and withthe prior knowledge in the to be learned subjects. Tendimensions of knowledge were tapped before and afterthe course by conventional and cognitive structuremeasures that were derived by the concept mappingmethodology. The fine-grain analysis of learningoutcomes yielded the following results: (a) studentsacquired only a small portion of the content in thecourse Introduction to Geomorphology, (b) the priorgeological and geomorphological knowledge did notaffect the learning of the new geomorphologicalcontents, (c) the minor effects appeared within ratherthan across knowledge dimensions, and they affectedmainly the learning of smaller knowledge units, and(d) concept definition cannot be considereda valid probe of knowledge. The differential effects of prior knowledge question thecentral, global and undifferentiated role that schematheories ascribe to prior knowledge in futurelearning. They call for greater reference to theexposed dimensions of knowledge by suggestingadditional factors to be considered in the sequencingof courses, as well as to the acquisition of complexknowledge with partial meaning of the basic knowledgeunits, and the use of new cognitive structure probesof knowledge.

Delayed acquisition of irregular inflectional morphology in Hebrew in early sequential bilingualism

Acquisition of the irregular forms of inflectional morphology may be a challenge for bilingual students because of the possible effect of infrequent input. Focusing on irregular plural forms of languages such as Hebrew can contribute to better understanding how bilingual children cope with anomalous morphological forms. The present study compares Russian— Hebrew-speaking sequential bilingual children with Hebrew-speaking monolingual children in their command on four measures of irregular forms of Hebrew plural nouns at two data collection points: the beginning of the second grade and the beginning of the third grade, at a time when the acquisition of these forms is still going on. Although results show that the bilingual children continued to be less accurate than their monolingual peers in producing the irregular forms at the second point of data collection, the medium-size effect (Cohen, 1992) was obtained only on one of four measures. Furthermore, the finding attests to the significant improvement of both groups in the course of one school year on all categories of irregular plural forms. It was also found that both groups acquire the irregular forms of the Hebrew plural noun system in a similar way and exhibit related patterns of developmental errors.

Academic achievement and individual differences in the learning processes of Israeli high-school students

Abstract The Inventory of Learning Processes (ILP), originally developed by Schmeck et al. (1977), assesses individual differences in information processing styles of college level students. The inventory consists of four scales: Deep Processing (DP), Methodical Study (MS), Fact Retention (FR), and Elaborative Processing (EP). Three aspects of the ILP scales have been studied for 9th and 11th grade high-school students. First, the internal consistency reliabilities of the ILP scales, two of which DP and MS were satisfactory. Second, the factor structure obtained in this study included three out of the four original factors. FR was not reconstructed. Third, the relationship between academic achievement and information processing of high-school students have been analyzed. Deep Processing (DP) came out as the most prominent style in its relation to academic achievement, particularly among the younger students.

Adolescents, accidents and the need to extend our scope of research

Accidents in adolescence result in mortality and disability that in many cases could have been prevented. The issue is a multi-factorial complex phenomenon, where new research ideas are needed to improve outcome. This short communication presents several research ideas that could provide new relevant answers.