Nura Resh

• Dr.
• Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Using the Israeli case, our study delves into teachers’ and students’ notions of social justice, exploring how they are shaped by both world culture trends and local conditions. We first identify social justice notions in the world culture perspective and Israeli society. Then, we empirically examine how these notions are understood by educational...

Based on the notion that trust is an essential feature in the development and maintenance of democratic civil society, and that school is central to the daily life of students who view schooling as critical to their long-term life chances, the author investigates in this study the relationship between students’ sense of justice in school and their...

Published in 1986, this book addresses the controversial classroom dilemma of ability segregation versus integration. It presents an extensive review of the current literature and formulates a conceptual framework for analysing the social processes that affect classroom composition and their effects on academic achievement. Applying an innovative f...

Adult citizenship requires a gradual acquisition of political culture—knowledge, attitudes, skills and patterns of behavior necessary to engage in political action. This is especially the case in democratic societies, which are based on citizens’ participation. Hence, education for citizenship is uniformly considered as a major mission of the commo...

This introduction to the SJR current special issue on Justice and Education, attempts to further depict the realm of education as a field of justice research. Leaning on Walzer’s (1983) seminal book Spheres of Justice, we first provide a general mapping of education as a “sphere of justice” and then describe and exemplify some of the salient justic...

Resting on Walzer’s distinction of Spheres of Justice that defines education as a specific justice sphere, we discuss in this chapter five educational subspheres where resources and rewards (or sanctions) are being constantly distributed and their “fairness” is evaluated by its main beneficiaries—the students. The five spheres that we discuss are:...

Contending that justice experiences at school transmit messages about the wider society and affects students' attitudes and behaviour, we investigated the effects of students' sense of distributive and (school) procedural justice on their sense of belonging to school and on their social and institutional trust. The study was carried out among about...

Contending that justice experiences in school serve as a hidden curriculum that conveys messages about the wider society and impact student attitudes and behavior, we investigate the effects of students’ sense of distributive and (school) procedural justice on democratic-related attitudes: liberal democratic orientation (civil rights), social trust...

This study identifies major preferences for combinations of rights and duties (henceforth, citizenship orientations), as reflected in the political worldview of Israeli junior-high school students. Two distinct orientations were found, termed here as 'liberal' and 'ethno-republican'. In order to contextualize the examination of citizenship orientat...

Grading students on a standardized hierarchical scale (usually numerical) is an institutionalized means of evaluating their academic performance and a very meaningful signpost in students' educational experience: Grades have a gatekeeping function, providing or withholding access to particular classes and schools; Grades affect students' self-image...

Machsomwatch (checkpoint watch) is an Israeli women protest and human rights movement aimed at monitoring military checkpoints in the West Bank. On a daily basis, in shifts, women volunteers observe the operation of the checkpoints and report their experiences to the public in Israel and worldwide (see www.machsomwatch.org). This paper examines the...

Sense of Justice as a Hidden Curriculum: Indicator of School Democracy that Affect Democratic Attitudes Nura Resh, School of Education, Hebrew university Clara Sabbagh, Faculty of Education, the University of Haifa Early adolescence is a crucial period in the formation of civic identity, the shaping of one’s “philosophy of life”, and the grad...

School integration (desegregation) was introduced in Israeli junior high schools in 1968 with the aim of increasing educational equality and decreasing (Jewish) ethnic divides. While never officially abandoned, a de facto retreat from this policy has been observed since the early 1990s, despite the voluminous research that revealed its positive, th...

As the major socializing agents, teachers have a central role in evaluating students: they test students and grade their performance; they praise or scold them for learning efforts, homework and class behavior. In the present chapter we focus on grading, the major evaluation tool in schools, and investigate the following questions: What are the dis...

Education is a distinct “sphere of justice” where resources and rewards (educational ’goods’) are being constantly distributed, and the fairness of their allocation is being evaluated, eliciting a sense of justice or injustice among the evaluators. A sense of (in)justice is a subjective perception of an individual that the reward s/he receives (act...

In this investigation I explore teachers’ perspectives on just grade allocation. The study was carried out among language, math and science teachers in a national sample of Israeli high schools, where teachers were required to weigh a set of considerations that are used in the decision on grade allocation. Findings suggest that (a) a teacher’s deci...

Local schools increasingly play a mediating role between intended curricular directives and actual classroom practice. This paper highlights how macro factors such as decentralized governance and subject's institutional status affect school-based decisions to diverge from official curricular policies. Specifically, it reports a three-dimensional co...

Distributive justice encompasses the principles that ‘ought’ to regulate the distribu tion of societal resources (‘goods’ and ‘bads’) to individuals or groups in different social spheres (like, economy, health, education). Such principles derive from socie ties' moral infrastructure, whereby norms about ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ are set up and people are...

Assessing students' aptitude and educational performance and grading them on a hierarchical scale is a universal feature of the schooling process. In light of grades' instrumental, motivational, and symbolic saliency in students' school experience, it is not surprising they are highly ""valued goods," and the process of their fair or unfair distrib...

Accompanying the Israeli version of PISA (OECD, 2000), 380 teachers in the national sample of 165 high schools were investigated in an attempt to answer the following questions: (a) To what extent do high school teachers hold pedagogical beliefs and use pedagogical practices that fit the PISA’s model for teaching literacy? (b) Do the relationships...

This article argues that there are distinct spheres of justice within education and examines a range of justice norms and distribution rules that characterize the daily life of schools and classrooms. Moving from the macro to micro level, we identify the following five areas: the right to education, the allocation of (or selection into) learning pl...

This study examines how students' evaluations of grade distribution in school are differentially shaped by socio-cultural conditions. Specifically, it investigates the extent to which Druze and Jewish students in Israel differ in their evaluations of the types of distribution rules that are actually and ideally preferred by teachers when they assig...

In this study we explored objective and attributed explanations of perceived injustice (PI) with respect to instrumental and relational rewards among junior high school students. Despite the socially heterogeneous school and classroom setting, PI found was relatively modest and differentiated by domain. It was more effectively accounted for by cogn...

In recent years, the predominance of the nation-state as the sole arbiter of curricular matters has eroded. New actors and organizations, especially local schools, have acquired greater discretion over the definition of school subjects and curricular emphases. This study investigates whether and how different patterns of educational governance infl...

Using data from about 400 ninth-grade students from six junior high schools in Israel, we have investigated students' perceptions about messages conveyed by counselors while guiding them into high school tracks. In Israel, where curriculum differentiation in high school tracks is relatively rigid, the decision on track placement is critical, and gu...

L'article analyse les differences existant entre les etablissements du secondaire en Israel, dans l'organisation de l'enseignement, malgre l'uniformite apparente du systeme educatif et sa centralisation. Des variations importantes existent dans l'implementation des programmes d'etudes et les auteurs montrent la complexite de l'organisation du savoi...

Drawing from both social justice and deprivation research, we conceptualize expressions of sense of deprivation (equated with sense of injustice) as a three-faceted structure defined by mode of experience, social reward, and social sphere of allocation. To empirically verify the fit between this conceptual structure and the actual configuration of...

This paper examines the process of reward allocation in schools and students'' perception of injustice therein. Assuming that both reward distribution and the evaluation of its fairness occur within, and are affected by, the educational context (schools and classrooms), this investigation focuses on the effect of classroom composition on perception...

Analyses of perceptions of social cleavages and inequality among junior high school students indicated the ability of young adolescents to accurately apprehend a multifaceted social structure. A perception of a fairly conflictual social map of a considerable level of inequality was revealed, but within a conception of a well-differentiated social s...

The differentiation of students into high school tracks is a critical point of transition in their educational careers. In Israel this transitional point is accentuated by the rigid structure of tracks and their different academic credentials at the end of high school. This article investigates the determinants of track placement in Israel and is b...

Abstract Organizational manipulations of student compositions are conceptualized as an enrichment or impoverishment of socoio-learning environments which are conceived as a set of educational and psycho-social processes which link student composition to learning and achievement. Among the processes discussed are differential formation by classroom...

This study examines the structure of social justice judgments (SJJ) on the basis of a conceptual mapping of two major facets of SJJ: distributive rules and social resources. We distinguish irreducible classes of rules (e.g., arithmetic equality, effort) and resources (e.g., money, prestige) and examine their affinities and contrasts in an effort to...

Learning Segregation in Junior High‐Schools in Israel: Causes and Consequences ABSTRACT Implementation of educational integration policy in Israel creates heterogeneous student compositions in the schools. Principals and teachers who, as a result, confront instructional difficulties, and who are ambiguous about this policy and its expected efficacy...

investigated socioeconomic and ethnic gaps in academic achievement in Israel in the mid-1980s, 30-35 years after the massive immigration in the 1950s that substantially changed the ethnic and socio-cultural composition of the Jewish population in Israel data were collected in 1986, in a national sample of 47 Jewish junior high schools despite a...

Assuming that the intellectual level of the classroom affects the quality of learning environments, it is argued that separating students into homogeneous educational frameworks enriches the environment for high-resource students and impoverishes it for low-resource students, whereas the converse occurs under heterogeneous mixing. Academic achievem...

This work explores whether a "psychological price" is indicated in the affective domain of the weaker student in abilty-mixed settings; whether this price differs for various dimensions of this domain; and whether it is related to academic achievement. Existing research in the fields of ability grouping, streaming, curriculum tracking, and ethnic s...

Effects of student grouping on academic achievement were examined in research among high school students in Israeli kibbutz schools, and in a nationwide sample of middle school students in Israel. Data analysis was based on a model developed from research findings in the United States, Sweden, Great Britain, and Israel. The treatment variable was c...

Title on added t.p.: Family background, school selection, parent aspirations and high school track placement. Includes abstract in English (leaves [i]-vii). Thesis (Ph. D.)--Hebrew University, Jerusalem, 1982. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 161-177).