The commitment to improving scientific literacy is voiced by governments throughout the world. One of the main objectives is the development of an informed and active citizenry able to participate in decision-making processes concerning socio-scientific issues (SSIs). There is a growing literature which suggests that engaging with the complexity of SSIs demands a high level of critical-thinking skills. These skills include: open-mindedness, independence, and scepticism. This three-year long study attempted to develop an intervention which will, in particular, provide subjects with an ability to be more open-minded, evaluate counter opinions, and respect those holding such opinions. The importance of developing an ability to value the ‘other' emerged from years of teaching academic English within an Israeli university, where initiating fruitful classroom discussion was problematic. The lack of dialogue resulted from individuals voicing strongly held opinions and seeming to be unable to acknowledge, and evaluate opposing views. This project was designed as an action research study. Both quantitative and qualitative data was collected, and analysed within an interpretive framework. As both the researcher and researched, many of my teaching methods were modified during the course of this study, including the introduction of pair-work in class. The study was conducted in three cycles over three consecutive years, primarily with two classes (one humanities and one science) in the pre-academic, mechina, program of an Israeli university. The mechina is a year-long programme and the students I taught had a single semester of English. This meant that three different cohorts of students were studied, (there were always 25-30 students in each class, so about 50 students were studied each year). The classes I taught were proficient in English, and were required to do a research project as part of the course. This project became my intervention. I developed a project based on devil's advocate which required them to choose an SSI that interested them, write a statement of their opinion, and then, much to their astonishment, find evidence to support the counter opinion. I gave a lesson on how to evaluate sources available on the internet. Although the project was set up as a standard research exercise, which is what they expected, the majority of students identified that this project made them more aware of the value of counter opinions – more ‘open-minded'. The primary method for collecting feedback on the project, and on other aspects of my course, utilized a projective technique – students wrote their views anonymously on a piece of paper; these are then analysed by coding the responses. This study also employed questionnaires, which were given to all students. These showed that the majority had little or no science education in high school, and yet registered high levels of interest in science and technology on a three-level Likert item. These findings add support to research that shows the more science studied in high school the lower the interest in the subject. Furthermore, by including a standard VOSTS (Views On Science-Technology-Society) I was able to show that my students believed the general public should participate in governmental decisions relating to SSIs. Responses to open-ended questions showed that most students, including those in the humanities, believed everyone should take science courses at university, and should have science classes in school (though not the current curriculum). In conclusion, this research indicated that interest in science was not related to studying the current school science curriculum. And feedback from the intervention demonstrated that students could be aware of a change in their cognitive skills, and independently acknowledge the importance of being open-minded – an important step towards promoting an active, informed, scientifically literate society.

This thesis describes a qualitative mixed-methods study carried out in a vocational-technical secondary school with second-chance adolescent learners of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) in a peripheral area of Israel. The learner population was characterized by complex, socio-economically disadvantaged family backgrounds and a high rate of learning disabilities. The study investigated the effects of a Mobile-Assisted Language Learning (MALL) intervention to support the development of basic EFL literacy skills by students who lacked solid foundational English skills. The intervention provided an interactive educational software application, The English Club™, on iPod Touch devices to scaffold learning and review of letter sounds and rules of English, integrate them into words and texts, and practice reading, writing and comprehension. Learners developed literacy skills depending on the level they reached in the application. The English Club follows a scaffolded Multi-Sensory Structured Language (MSL) approach, adapting for struggling EFL learners the Hickey Multi-Sensory Method (Combley, 2001), developed by Kathleen Hickey of the British Dyslexia Institute. Printed books containing the material complemented the use of the MALL. The English teachers at the school chose the learners who participated and determined how to integrate the intervention into their English classrooms. An investigation of the teachers' roles was included in the study. The methodology was primarily action research with case studies of individual learners and teachers. Pre-intervention and post-intervention data on learners' English knowledge, skills, attitudes and opinions and on teachers' attitudes and opinions about use of this MALL intervention was generated via skills assessments and semi-structured interviews. As a participant-teacher-observer, I observed the intervention's use in classes and in sessions with individual students. Changes in skills, attitudes and opinions were analyzed in the framework of Vygotsky's theories of language acquisition and the Zone of Proximal Development as elaborated in Scaffolding Theory. Theories of motivation, literacy and second language acquisition, and how struggling learners experience these, have provided additional lenses for analysis. My goals in performing this study were to understand in depth the whole picture of the intervention, both its effects on students' English skills and attitudes, and the factors that shaped these outcomes. The study's findings contribute to an understanding of the ways in which delivering a scaffolded MSL approach to literacy education via MALL can contribute to addressing the world crisis in literacy acquisition, and issues that must be addressed for this type of intervention to be effective. Findings showed that learners who actively engaged in the intervention made significant progress in their English literacy skills, increased their confidence in their ability to learn English and thus their willingness to engage in learning, and demonstrated increased awareness of the connection between their own investment of effort and learning. This success was shaped by many factors, including variation among individual learner profiles, the degree of teachers' support for the intervention, increasing students' motivation to invest effort, minimizing disruptions to the students' learning routine, and maximizing access to charged, working devices and to books. The individual MALL delivery platform enabled an untrained, inexperienced but committed teacher to provide the benefits of this scaffolded method, appropriate to her learners' needs, in multi-level English classrooms and to provide a solution for students returning from extended absences to catch up with missed classwork. Recommendations for policy and practice include use of such scaffolded MSL MALL applications with struggling language learners in conjunction with printed materials and closely accompanied by committed teachers, who do not have to be highly trained in specialized methods to support learning by struggling students. Schools engaging in such interventions need to ensure that the devices will be fully available for use during learning hours, minimize disruptions to the class schedule, and maximize students' use of the MALL app and books in class, during free time at school, and at home. If necessary, extrinsic rewards should be offered to overcome students' learned helplessness.

The aim of the current case study was to examine the integration of a social skills learning programme for young people aged 13-18 identified with ADHD and learning difficulties within the framework of a junior and high school in Israel designed for young people identified with ADHD. At the start of this inquiry, the stance of the Israeli Ministry of Education mainly leaned on the medicalised model. During the process of conducting this study, the researcher developed a gradual shift from the medicalised to the social constructivist model as an alternative which considers young people from a holistic view. The study explored three perspectives on the integration of the social skills learning groups within the school: those of the educational staff, the therapeutic staff who facilitated the social skills learning groups and those of the group participants. It also explored how each group perceived the intervention in terms of supporting social skills among young people identified with ADHD. Two groups of students took part. One group comprised seven students from the 7th grade who were in their first year of the intervention and another group comprised seven students from the 9th grade who were in their third year of the four-year programme. The study was conducted using a qualitative methodology from an insider perspective, the researcher being a therapist and facilitator of one of the social skills learning groups. Data were collected by semi-structured interviews with staff members, the researcher's reflective diary and a student questionnaire. The study found that the educational staff's perspective on the social skills learning groups involved a gradual process from difficulty accepting the groups to believing that they played an important role in school provision. A parallel process took place among the therapeutic staff who questioned the groups' definition as a class or as group therapy, which required the therapists to examine their professional identity. This process of self-examination of staff members' professional identity and examination of the other staff members' professional roles influenced the integration of the groups in the school. Overall, the study suggested that interventions focusing on assisting the development of social skills can play an important role in school provision for young people identified with ADHD when they are included as part of the school curriculum. However, in order to successfully embed a therapeutic intervention within a school framework, the study suggested that teachers and therapists should cooperate both professionally and personally to build a new common language toward a common goal.

Art therapy training programmes around the world feature a unique type of course based on dynamic art-work experience and conducted in the context of a core student group. The course is usually called an 'experiential group course'. There is world-wide practical recognition in the professional art therapy literature of the need for dynamic experiential artwork-based courses in art therapy training. What is new is that Israeli lecturers have extended this 'experiential group course' into what I term 'a topic-led dynamic experiential artwork-based course'. The nature of this course in Israel and how it is deployed, planned and conducted is the subject of this thesis. The data for this dissertation were collected from in-depth and wide-ranging interviews with three groups of persons: (a) 11 of Israel's 40 lecturers lecturing on Master's degree and Masters-level plastic art therapy training programmes. All have taught in the teaching mode under investigation here for many years and I looked on them as partners with me on a journey of discovery into the essential nature of this teaching mode in Israel; (b) 15 working art therapists who graduated from Israeli training programmes 3-15 years before participating in this research and who had been working as art therapists since then. They provided a reflexive analysis of what it was like to take a topic-led dynamic experiential artwork-based course. (c) three directors of art therapy training programmes (one current, two former). provided me the background to the theoretical development of art therapy training in Israel. In addition, as an insider researcher, a senior art therapist who has herself designed and taught topic-led dynamic art-based experiential mode courses for many years, I have used my own experience and example from my practice to illustrate and corroborate the points made by my interviewees. The interviews indicated that over the forty years the dynamic experiential teaching mode has been deployed in Israeli art therapy training its use has been extended to the design and teaching of a wide range of theoretical topics and that this extension occurred at approximately the same time on all Israel's recognised art therapy training programmes. From the point of view of the theory of art therapy training this thesis argues that the professional literature displays a significant gap. Many scholars have stressed the vital contribution made by dynamic experiential artwork-based courses to future practitioners' training but no researcher has yet clarified when and for what purpose certain theoretical courses are taught in this mode, how such courses are designed and conducted, and how they produce on students the effects the students say they do—what so many students term their 'magic'. And yet the lecturers who make use of this teaching mode declare it to be indispensable to the transmission of art therapy's concepts, language and methods to the next generation of art therapists. The object of this doctoral research, then, is to explore and expose the nature of topic-led dynamic experiential artwork-based courses in Israel and their particular contribution to Israeli art therapy training. (The research does not aim to investigate what theory of art therapy these lecturers represent nor what body of psychological and other theory they transmit to their students). Given a constructivist epistemology, a phenomenological research paradigm is deployed to investigate how dynamic experiential artwork-based courses achieve their aims. Interview data are analysed by the inductive Socratic analysis method and by theoretical reading, taking a heuristic approach. The key contribution of this thesis to knowledge about art therapy training methods in Israel, is that it unlocks and conceptualizes the transformation of these topic-led dynamic experiential artwork-based courses which the thesis also demonstrates to be transformative for their students. A central argument is that, to achieve these transformative insights lecturers integrate three content elements — theoretical material, artwork-based experiential workshops, and the emotional materials evoked from the students by and during the workshops. They adapt and adjust their workshops and the art materials offered the students to the needs of the theoretical topic they wish to teach. And they make dynamic use of the responses of individual students and the student group to the art materials and the artworks produced from them for the purpose of conveying/ instilling this theoretical topic. The five elements of lecturer, individual students, core group, art materials/ artworks and the learning space created by the lecturer interact uniquely within a dynamic relationship in response to the course topic in what I term in this thesis a 'pentagonal potential space'. It is the integration of the five constituent elements of this relationship and the interrelationships between them that make the courses 'transformative'. In a nutshell, these courses (a) take students on an inner emotional journey which allows the self to adjust to a dynamic therapeutic perception of the course topic; (b) enable students to investigate the given topic to great depths of experiential and intellectual insight and be changed by this insight; and (c) generate in both individual students and the student group emotional processes relating to the topic, which shape their therapeutic development with respect to that topic. These three effects together generate in the student a meaningful and critical development of their therapeutic self as art therapist, a development which so many of them call 'magical'.

Reading comprehension in English as a foreign language (EFL) is a key to success in academic studies in Israel. As Israel is a cultural melting pot, adult students come from widely diverse educational backgrounds, often determined by their cultural environment. They arrive at the university or college classroom with vastly different approaches to learning and reading, in general, and to reading in EFL, in particular. The challenge for the EFL teacher is to help students draw from their cultural toolkits while exposing them to new tools so that they can reach their full learning potential. The rationale of the current inquiry is that in order to tailor a programme that takes into account students' needs, a better understanding of the impact of cultural background on their learning process is essential. This inquiry was guided by three main research questions: How do differing cultural, religious and linguistic backgrounds impact upon adult students' approach to and process of learning reading comprehension in English? How do these backgrounds impact upon progress and achievement in reading comprehension in English? And which teaching approach or approaches can best address the range of needs of a culturally diverse student group? To address these questions, an action research study was conducted using a case study approach. Thirty-nine young adult students who participated in a year-long matriculation preparation programme in a teachers' college in Israel were examined. The programme was based on providing students with both bottom-up and top-down reading skills, with particular emphasis on reading strategies. The learning process that students underwent generated qualitative and quantitative data through class observations, interviews, and student records. The data indicated that student background played a significant role in how learning, reading, and EFL were approached. Family background, whether more 'traditional' or less 'traditional', reflected students' cultural background, echoed by a school system sharing a similar mindset and approach to EFL pedagogy. As a result, students' background impacted upon their classroom behaviour and social engagement. Cultural distinctions were apparent at entry level, but were not determining factors in student progress and achievement over the course of the year. Students with greater intercultural competence adopted different learning approaches and reading strategies from those with which they had been educated in their cultural environment and appropriated them as their own. These students also made the most significant progress in their EFL reading comprehension, regardless of background. For students to share their diverse learning approaches and adopt new ones from one another, as well as the new strategies offered by the programme, the establishment of a 'third space', or classroom culture, was crucial. Providing such a space allowed students to exchange learning methods, examine their own, and finally adopt those that were most effective for them. Enhanced reading comprehension at the end of the programme resulted from a process of several cycles of integration and engagement. Those students who reported feeling more integrated within mainstream Israeli society, in general, were also those who more easily integrated within the classroom culture. These students were also more socially engaged in class and showed greater engagement with texts in English. Consequently they made greater progress and reached higher achievements. When teaching EFL reading comprehension to a multicultural class of students, it is argued that a classroom culture should celebrate their diversity and allow them to voice their distinct learning approaches. At the same time, their voices should be harmonized through a unified learning approach, based on the application of reading strategies and engagement with a text.

The study reported here originated in my therapeutic work with children at risk and my search for a therapeutic approach which would help them develop the inner strength to cope with their difficulties. The concept of ‘meaning in life' as a source of strength has been extensively and richly studied among older age groups, both with respect to the different personal meanings which everyone finds in their life and with respect to the effect on one's life of possessing a sense of 'meaning in life', but it has been neglected almost entirely among children. As a result, the aim of this research was to further knowledge about the concept of 'meaning in life' for children. Due to the paucity of research with children regarding this issue, it was needed to first establish that meaning in life was at all a relevant and researchable concept for children. Consequently, the primary research questions were as follows: Does the concept of ‘meaning in life' have relevance for children? Relatedly, what are the (dis)connections between children's understandings of their own lives, and what matters to them, and, the adult concept of ‘meaning in life? To examine these over-arching questions, the following four sub-questions were devised: - What do children think are the most important and meaningful things in their lives? - What do children think is the best way to live life? - What nature of goals and purpose do children have for their lives and do they believe that they have character traits and strengths which would help them to fulfil their goals/purpose? - How do children's individuality and the differences between them show themselves in their perspectives on meaning in life? To what extent is gender associated with variations in response? The research adopted a Constructivist-Phenomenological approach, with the aim of getting as close as possible to the children's own perceptions and experience of their world. Thirty eight-year-old children in their third year at two primary schools in different neighbourhoods of the same central Israeli city were interviewed using semi-structured interviews. This data collection approach was complemented by two creative elements: a short semi-humorous story told at the start to set the tone of the interview, and a picture drawn at the end of the interview by the children to illustrate what was important in their life. Some interviews were carried out individually and some as a group. The data analysis method chosen was Smith's (1996) and Smith and Osborn's (2008) Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). This thesis makes two original contributions to knowledge. The first is the discovery that meaning in life is as pertinent a concept among children as it is among adults. Children may not understand the concept of 'meaning in life' in as full a way as an adult might, but they do have clear and well-shaped opinions about the most important things in their lives (e.g. family and friends) and how they should best live (e.g. by helping others and living in peace). They have goals and plans for the future (e.g. Ambitions to become a pilot or teacher) and they believe that they have traits and strengths that will help them in reaching their goals (e.g. that being wise, kind or curious will help them in life). The second important contribution is methodological: the research technics developed in this study (the semi-structured interview enriched by story-telling and picture-drawing) has provided what appears to be a reliable way of generating valid responses from the participants. It could be used by researchers in the future to further understanding about how children perceive the notion of meaning in life.