Creativity can be viewed from different perspectives, such as the creative thinking process, the product, the creative environment and the individual. The physics domain, which is based on experiments, research, hypotheses and thinking outside the box, can serve as an excellent grounding for creativity development. This article focuses on creative thinking in physics textbooks. Creative thinking includes divergent thinking, which consists of four core components: fluency, flexibility, novelty and elaboration. The purpose of our study is to understand whether and how physics textbooks (such as the Israeli high-school book Newtonian Mechanics) enable the promotion and development of creative thinking. Findings indicate that they do not, so there is a need to raise physics teachers' awareness of the importance of creative thinking in learning materials. It is advisable for physics teachers to engage in professional development courses in appropriate teaching strategies for the development of this creativity.
International surveys have served as agents of change for the introduction of reforms in curricula worldwide. The Israeli Ministry of Education set a goal of raising Israel's ranking in international surveys so that Israel will be among the 10 leading countries in the Program for International Student Assessment and Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). The Ministry of Education therefore acted to reduce the gap between the intended and the attained science curriculum by intervening on two curricular levels: the intended and the implemented. Over the years, documents that contributed to the adoption of contents and skills from the international surveys were added to the science curriculum, until the publication of the new science curriculum. The intervention was successful and in TIMSS 2011, Israel ranked 13 out of the 42 participating countries. The present research examines the influence of international surveys on science education in Israel, over the course of time (1996–2011). Analysis of documents accompanying the curriculum shows a clear message that international surveys are standards that should be used for teaching, and every additional document closes the gap between the science curriculum and the international surveys.
Abstract. Teaching via inquiry has been found to be a strategy suitable for the development of argument skills. The influence of the impartation of argumentation skills on the quality of the High school students' written argumentation was tested in the present study. Twenty written arguments in bio-inquiry papers were analysed by using two complementary tools: Toulmin's Argument Pattern to analyse the components and a modification of Toulmin's Argument Pattern to evaluate the quality of the written arguments. The various tools enabled us to pinpoint the differences between two groups: one group that did not receive scaffolds for constructing arguments and a group that received scaffolds for writing arguments. The findings indicate that impartation of argumentation skills improves the argumentation abilities and level. Students who received scaffolds for writing an argument wrote more and different types of arguments for each claim and wrote a higher quality argumentation in bio-inquiry papers.
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