Orit Herscovitz

• Technion – Israel Institute of Technology

Learners’ independence and self-regulated learning (SRL) may be achieved by online teaching, promoting learners’ 21 st century skills. Transitioning into online learning and teaching requires a variety of teachers’ knowledge types and competencies. Mapping these knowledge types with a dedicated tool can help improve teachers’ professional developme...

Education is always evolving, and most recently has shifted to increased online or remote learning. Digital Learning and Teaching in Chemistry compiles the established and emerging trends in this field, specifically within the context of learning and teaching in chemistry. This book shares insights about five major themes: best practices for teachi...

Our study investigates the effect of hybrid courses and reading scientific articles on scientific literacy of biomedical engineering students. Participants included about 100 undergraduate and graduate students who participated in one or two hybrid courses. Our research goal was to study the effect of reading scientific articles and participating i...

Content knowledge (CK), pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) and, assessment knowledge (AK) are fundamental types of teachers’ knowledge. Second-career, pre-service chemistry teachers leave the industry and return to the Technion to study in the Views program to obtain a high school teaching certificate. Their background can potentially contribute t...

Facilitating students' chemical literacy is a focal point of current science education. This study examines views of chemists and chemistry teachers on chemical literacy and, more broadly, on scientific literacy of four kinds of stakeholders: scientists, teachers, STEM students, and the educated public. We explored the views of 347 participants, re...

Due to high dropout rates (30%) among first-year students, our college of engineering operates programmes for promoting students’ retention and learning. The peer-led team learning (PLTL) programme accompanies Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics introductory courses with a high rate of failures, and incorporates workshops of small grou...

An ongoing process of reforming chemical education in middle and high schools in our country introduced the technology-enhanced learning environment (TELE) to chemistry classes. Teachers are encouraged to integrate technology into pedagogical practices in meaningful ways to promote 21st century skills; however, this effort is often hindered by teac...

In recent years, scientists are increasingly requested to make science accessible to the general public. This accessibility will help promote scientific knowledge sharing and obtain public support for science. The research goals were to identify the common themes to science education and science communication and to explore how various stakeholders...

For an educational reform to succeed, teachers need to adjust their perceptions to the reform’s new curricula and strategies and cope with new content, as well as new teaching and assessment strategies. Developing students’ scientific literacy through context-based chemistry and higher order thinking skills was the framework for establishing a new...

Higher education instruction has developed significantly over the past two decades, influenced by two trends: advances in active learning methods and integration of web technology in e-Learning. Many studies found that active learning improves students' success, involvement and thinking skills. Nevertheless, internationally, most instructors mainta...

Instruction in higher education has developed significantly over the past two decades, influenced by two trends: promotion of active learning methods and integration of web technology in e-Learning. Many studies found that active teaching improves students' success, involvement and thinking skills. Nevertheless, internationally, most instructors ma...

Today’s society is continuously coping with sustainability‐related complex issues in the Science‐Technology‐Environment‐Society (STES) interfaces. In those contexts, the need and relevance of the development of students’ higher‐order cognitive skills (HOCS) such as question‐asking, critical‐thinking, problem‐solving and decision‐making capabilities...

The question of how to present cultural heritage resources in a way that attracts potential users is becoming important in our ever-changing world. This paper describes MOSAICA system – a web 2.0-based toolbox, dedicated for the preservation and presentation of cultural heritage. This paper also describes an evaluation study that examined MOSAICA s...

Although many innovations were developed in teaching in the past twenty years, only a limited fraction of faculty tends to adopt these new methods. Changing the way teaching is viewed within the engineering departments may be the appropriate lever to bring about substantive change in the teaching practices of engineering faculty. With the aim to re...

MOSAICA's Virtual Expeditions (VE) are designed to allow interactive exploration of pre-selected semantically related content through alternative story-telling templates and games. A constructivist learning environment is applied in the VEs through the use of different modes of knowledge representation and active exploration of cultural heritage st...

Reform efforts are often unsuccessful because they failed to understand that teachers play a key role in making educational reforms successful. This paper describes a long‐term teacher professional development (PD) program aimed at educating and training teachers to teach interdisciplinary topics using case‐based method in science. The research obj...

Technology is becoming an increasingly common component of Western world K-12 ‎education. Changing the teaching environment through the introduction of ‎computerized and Web-based activities requires that the teachers receive long-term ‎support in order to elevate their technological readiness and Web-related ‎qualifications. Regardless of their ar...

An effective strategy for improving problem-solving ability is fostering students' question-posing capabilities through the use of real-world problems. This article describes research on scientific question-posing capabilities among 10th-grade students who were studying air quality in a cooperative way, using the jigsaw method. Case studies and ana...

The collisional energy transfer probability P(ΔE) of polyatomic molecules in the gas phase is calculated for the strong-collision case. From it the average energy transferred per collision 〈ΔE〉 is evaluated. It is found that for the equilibrium systems which were investigated P(ΔE) is symmetric and it has a Gaussian form for a large colliding pair....

Intermolecular energy-transfer probabilities are calculated as a function of the size and temperature of a variety of molecules. In addition, two quantities are reported: the average energy transferred up and down under equilibrium conditions (ΔE) and the average energy (ΔEeff) which is needed to transport a molecule above a threshold value for dec...

The temperature and size dependence of the collisional energy transfer probability and average ΔE removed in a single collision is calculated for a classical reactive system under the strong collision assumption. It is found that even though the average energy transferred per collision, 〈ΔE〉, for all up and down collision increases with the tempera...

Development of independent learners is an important science education objective. To achieve this, learners need to know what they know and what they should know, so they can be in control of their learning process. Question posing is a higher-order thinking skill, and as such it is linked to metacognitive knowledge. This chapter describes two relat...