Outstanding Dissertation and Student`s Paper Award

Outstanding Dissertation - Chais 2024
The Wisdom of the Crowd in Education: Engaging Teachers and Students in the Co-Creation of Pedagogical Knowledge to Support Personalized Teaching in Blended Learning Environments

Dr. Elad Jacobson - Weizmann Institute of Science

My research focuses on examining how semantic information helps teachers search for and select personalized learning materials within repositories of open educational resources, leveraging the wisdom of the crowd—teachers and students—to collect such information, and the impact of these processes on teachers' reflective thinking. The term semantic information refers to metadata that contains information about the types of knowledge a learning resource addresses, teachers' opinions and feedback on the resource’s suitability for different pedagogical scenarios, and evaluative judgments regarding its quality.
The primary goal is to expand our understanding of how to design learning environments that support teachers in tailoring their instruction to their own pedagogical preferences and to the needs of each individual student. The research focuses on crowdsourcing—the collection of information from teachers and students—as a means of gathering semantic and evaluative data on learning resources. Specifically, it explores mechanisms to enhance teachers’ motivation to contribute metadata about educational resources, such as providing social recognition.
The findings highlight the importance teachers attribute to peer recommendations on learning resources, the feasibility of increasing teachers’ motivation to contribute such recommendations through social mechanisms, and the relationship between the strength of social ties within the teaching community and the effectiveness of these mechanisms.

Student`s Paper Award

Building Emotional Bridges: Teachers-Mediated Program to Support Children with Autism -
Ifat Bar. Dr. Ofer Golan, Prof. Sigal Eden, Bar-Ilan University

People with autism experience significant challenges in emotional understanding that is fundamental for social functioning, including difficulties in identifying emotions from nonverbal cues and social context, as well as deficits in emotional language expression. This study aimed to enhance emotional understanding among children with autism in special education classes through a teacher-mediated computer-based intervention program. The research included 116 children with autism (17 girls and 98 boys), aged 7-10, who were randomly assigned at the class level to either the intervention group (n=59), which participated in two computer-mediated lessons weekly for 22 weeks, or the control group (n=57), which continued with the standard special education curriculum. Pre- and post- intervention assessments measured participants' abilities to identify emotions from nonverbal cues, comprehend emotions in social contexts, and utilize expressive emotional language. Results demonstrated that the intervention group showed statistically significant improvements in emotion identification from non-verbal cues and social context, as well as enhanced emotional language capabilities compared to the control group. However, no significant improvement was observed for emotions not specifically addressed in the intervention program. The integration of such technology-mediated interventions within educational systems presents a promising approach for enhancing emotional and social development among students with autism. To the full paper