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Dani Ben-Zvi, Ph.D.

Professor of statistics education and educational technology

in the Faculty of Education at the University of Haifa, Israel

President of IASE, the International Association for Statistical Education  

Member of the Department of Learning and Instructional Sciences, Faculty of Education, University of Haifa

Member of the Educational Technologies Graduate Program

Member of the Mathematics Education Graduate Department

Scientific management member of the Center of Research Excellence TCSS

Head of the Connections Research Team

I am a professor at the University of Haifa in the Faculty of Education, member of the Technology in Education Graduate Department, and member of the Mathematics Education Graduate Department. 

My research interests focus on two important aspects of human life: statistical reasoning and technology-enhanced learning. The first refers to the kind of thinking involved in creating and evaluating data-based claims that are used ubiquitously as means of forming credible arguments and of making decisions under uncertainty. All citizens need nowadays to be able to engage in this kind of thinking processes and have basic statistical literacy and numeracy skills. It should therefore be a standard ingredient of every learner's education. The second aspect, technology, is rapidly transforming the way people communicate and collaborate, consume information and create knowledge, learn and teach. Educational technologies can mediate and facilitate thinking about complex domains – such as statistics, mathematics or science, making them more accessible to all learners.

These two themes are simultaneously present and closely intertwined in my work: I study (a) students' statistical learning and the development of their statistical reasoning as it occurs in the social context of the classroom; and (b) the roles of innovative tools in offering new forms of understanding, learning and communication in technology-enhanced learning communities. I pursue these themes in classroom studies that foster inquiry, reasoning, argumentation, collaboration, and learners’ use of notations and technological tools. I use design experiment methodology, geared toward the double aim of promoting theory and improving practice. More specifically, while “engineering” particular forms of learning, I develop domain-specific theories by systematically studying those forms of learning and the means of supporting them.

I am a co-founder with Joan Garfield of the International Collaboration for Research on Statistical Reasoning, Thinking, and Literacy (SRTL), and co-chair it with Katie Makar.

I received my Ph.D. from the Weizmann Institute of Science in 2001, at the Department of Science Teaching.

"אני זוכר שאלה בספר לימוד החשבון. 

על רכבת שיוצאת ממקום אחד ורכבת אחרת 

שיוצאת ממקום אחר. מתי יפגשו? 

ואף אחד לא שאל מה יקרה כאשר יפגשו, 

אם יעצרו או יעברו אחת על פני השניה ואולי יתנגשו. 

ולא היתה שאלה על איש שיוצא ממקום אחד 

ואשה שיוצאת ממקום אחר. מתי יפגשו 

והאם בכלל יפגשו ולכמה זמן יפגשו? …" 

(יהודה עמיחי, מתוך: "פתוח סגור פתוח" בהוצאת שוקן) 

מלאכת החינוך נועדה למאמינים באדם. למרות היותה מלאכה סיזיפית, שאינה נושאת פרות מידיים בדרך-כלל, המפגש בין מורים ותלמידיהם הם לב לבה של ההוויה החינוכית המתחדשת מדי רגע. האם יפגשו וכמה זמן יפגשו ועל מה ישוחחו? האם תעתק נשימתם לכמה רגעים משותפים של סקרנות וגילוי? 

אני משוחח עם תלמידי בשיעורים על הפלא של חיפוש שיטתי אחר תשובות לשאלות מסקרנות בעזרת נתונים (חינוך סטטיסטי) ועל כלים טכנולוגיים שמשנים דרכי חשיבה ותקשורת בין בני אדם (טכנולוגיות חינוכיות). 

אשמח לשוחח, על שאלות אלו ואחרות, גם בשעות הקבלה ובאמצעות הדואר האלקטרוני. 

News

January 2018: Taking Citizen Science to School: Breaking Boundaries Between School and Society

Taking Citizen Science to School capitalizes on affordances of the networked society to break boundaries between traditional silos — students, citizens, and scientists; formal and informal learning; science and data literacies; classrooms and out-of-school environments; physical and online spaces; educational researchers and practitioners; science and science-education. Specifically, by engaging students within citizen science projects, this initiative aims to elucidate how breaking boundaries between traditional silos fosters meaningful STEM learning.

Taking Citizen Science to School is guided by three mutually-enriching goals. These include: (a) developing and substantiating a conceptual framework of meaningful STEM learning through student engagement in citizen science; (b) engaging middle and high school students in real and ongoing scientific endeavors through technology-enhanced learning environments co-designed by a network of research-practice partnerships that build school capacity for sustaining the innovation; and (c) generating principled practical knowledge that will guide policy and scale-up the innovation within the highly diverse Israeli educational system. Reed more >>

January 2013: LINKS I-CORE

Our proposal to establish an Israeli Center of Excellence (I-CORE) in the area of "Education and the New Information Society" was approved by the I-CORE steering committee on January 30 2013. The center title is LINKS (Learning in a NetworKed Society) and will focus on "Co-creation of Knowledge in Technology-Enhanced Communities of Learning." Our group introduces collaboration with researchers from the University of Haifa, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Technion and the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya. Prof. Yael Kali is the scientific manager of the Center. The center will be established during the current year (2013).The Centers of Excellence program is an important component of the Multi-Year Reform Plan in Higher Education - a program at fundamentally strengthening the long term positioning of Israel's academic research and its stature among leading researchers in Israel and abroad. Reed more >>