Telerehabilitation offers a unique solution for continuity of care in pediatric rehabilitation under physical distancing. The major aims of this study were to: (1) describe the development of telerehabilitation usage guidelines in a large hospital in Israel, and to (2) evaluate the implementation of telerehabilitation from the perspectives of healthcare practitioners and families. An expert focus group developed guidelines which were disseminated to multidisciplinary clinicians. Following sessions, clinicians filled The Clinician Evaluation of Telerehabilitation Service (CETS), a custom-built feedback questionnaire on telerehabilitation, and parents completed the client version of the Therapist Presence Inventory (TPI-C) and were asked to rate the effectiveness of sessions on an ordinal scale. Four goals of telerehabilitation sessions were defined: (1) maintenance of therapeutic alliance, (2) provision of parental coping strategies, (3) assistance in maintaining routine, and (4) preventing functional deterioration. Principal Components Analysis was used for the CETS questionnaire and the relationships of CETS and TPI-C with child’s age and the type of session were evaluated using Spearman’s correlations and the Kruskal–Wallis H test. In total, sixty-seven telerehabilitation sessions, with clients aged 11.31 ± 4.8 years, were documented by clinicians. Three components (child, session, parent) explained 71.3% of the variance in CETS. According to therapists, their ability to maintain the therapeutic alliance was generally higher than their ability to achieve other predefined goals (p < 0.01). With younger children, the ability to provide feedback to the child, grade treatment difficulty and provide coping strategies to the parents were diminished. Families perceived the therapist as being highly present in therapy regardless of treatment type. These results demonstrate a potential framework for the dissemination of telerehabilitation services in pediatric rehabilitation.

Background:The global COVID-19 pandemic turned the adoption of on-line assessment in the institutions for higher education from possibility to necessity. Thus, in the end of Fall 20/21 semester Tel Aviv University (TAU)-the largest university in Israel-designed and implemented a scalable procedure for administering proctored remote examinations. This procedure is applicable to different kinds of examinations in diverse disciplines and to disparate degree levels.Objectives: This study aims to deepen the knowledge with respect to the design and adoption of remote proctoring at an institutional level Methods: First, based on lessons learned from the first semester of COVID-19, we describe the development and implementation of an institution-wide protocol for conducting on-line proctored assessment. We show the large-scale applicability of the protocol for administering examinations via Moodle with remote proctoring via Zoom.The accurately designed procedures that included careful consideration of all parties involved-academic staff members, students, administrative staff and proctorsenabled TAU to successfully assess the learning outcomes of its 25,000 students, while maintaining validity, compatibility and reliability of the assessment. Second, we report combined data from surveys of 4380 students and 188 faculty-members (18% and 12% response rate respectively), conducted at TAU following these examinations. Results and Conclusions:With over 90% of the students experiencing at least one, and 80% of faculty-members administering at least one proctored remote examination, these heterogeneous sources of data allow us to investigate a unique and complementary perspective of the process. Some of the significant findings consist of the over-all perception of the students' integrity by both groups surveyed; the discrepancy in the groups' perspectives of the adequate form of learning-assessmentwith the instructors preferring proctored examinations and the students-formativeassessment; and the influence of the pedagogical challenges on the perception of Smadar Patael and Julia Shamir contributed equally

ObjectiveThe ultimate goal of reading is to understand written text. To accomplish this, children must first master decoding, the ability to translate printed words into sounds. Although decoding and reading comprehension are highly interdependent, some children struggle to decode but comprehend well, whereas others with good decoding skills fail to comprehend. The neural basis underlying individual differences in this discrepancy between decoding and comprehension abilities is virtually unknown.MethodsWe investigated the neural basis underlying reading discrepancy, defined as the difference between reading comprehension and decoding skills, in a three-part study: 1) The neuroanatomical basis of reading discrepancy in a cross-sectional sample of school-age children with a wide range of reading abilities (Experiment-1; n = 55); 2) Whether a discrepancy-related neural signature is present in beginning readers and predictive of future discrepancy (Experiment-2; n = 43); and 3) Whether discrepancy-related regions are part of a domain-general or a language specialized network, utilizing the 1000 Functional Connectome data and large-scale reverse inference from Neurosynth.org (Experiment-3).ResultsResults converged onto the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), as related to having discrepantly higher reading comprehension relative to decoding ability. Increased gray matter volume (GMV) was associated with greater discrepancy (Experiment-1). Region-of-interest (ROI) analyses based on the left DLPFC cluster identified in Experiment-1 revealed that regional GMV within this ROI in beginning readers predicted discrepancy three years later (Experiment-2). This region was associated with the fronto-parietal network that is considered fundamental for working memory and cognitive control (Experiment-3).InterpretationProcesses related to the prefrontal cortex might be linked to reading discrepancy. The findings may be important for understanding cognitive resilience, which we operationalize as those individuals with greater higher-order reading skills such as reading comprehension compared to lower-order reading skills such as decoding skills. Our study provides insights into reading development, existing theories of reading, and cognitive processes that are potentially significant to a wide range of reading disorders.