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This chapter describes the current state of special education in Israel as well as what the future holds with possible solutions to improve services for individuals with disabilities. Israel is a very complex society and, as such, the educational system is very complex as well. The development of the special education system in Israel will be described as well as the current policies. In addition, different service delivery models will be explained. Inclusionary practices in Israel will be discussed as well as the prevalence and incidence rates of different disabilities in Israel and how they have changed over time. Finally, different strategies and models for implementation of services will be described and the importance of teacher training to meet student needs will be highlighted.

This article presents a conceptual synthesis of the international literature on inclusive education while expanding upon, and incorporating, the articles in this special issue. The authors present their 3P model (philosophy, policy and praxis) and relate each paper in this special issue to different aspects of their model.

This article serves as an epilogue to this special issue of the Journal of Educational Administration as well as a discussion of historical and conceptual distinctions between mainstreaming and inclusion while examining global trends in understanding the move toward inclusive education.

The authors examined the detrimental effects of ableism and a medical model of disability and their effects on the educational system. They conducted an analysis based on examining the philosophy, policy and practice of the inclusive movement, specifically by examining conceptual models and inclusive decisions, conceptual frameworks for describing inclusive policy and a focus of the application to educational administration. The authors examined the global movement from segregation/exclusion to integration and then to inclusionary praxis.

The authors maintain that the inclusion literature lacks a sound positivistic empirical base, and so they present throughout the article possible avenues for such research as well as future directions for comparative research.

Understanding the philosophical underpinnings of the inclusive movement is central to developing viable inclusive educational settings. The authors distinguish between inclusive schools and local educational authorities where stakeholders have moved toward an inclusionary system (the minority) versus locales who are reluctant to move systems to actual change.

This article takes a wider view of inclusionary practices, from one focusing on children with disabilities to one focusing on historical and traditional exclusionary practices. By widening the scope of the inclusion discussion, to one of exclusion, the authors present a viably wider lens to educational administration.

The intent of this article is to broaden one’s understanding of program evaluation methods that are responsive to disability and take into account various approaches to leadership within a special education context. Program evaluations for special education have often been relegated to compliance reviews and results-driven accountability measures. By promoting approaches to leadership that embrace responsive evaluation approaches and are inclusive of stakeholders from often disenfranchised groups, findings may emerge that otherwise might not be visible with traditional approaches.

A synthesis of the evaluation literature from leading journals, books and edited volumes is used to capture salient concepts necessary for understanding the degree to which evaluation and approaches respond to disability and culture. Additionally, the literature on leadership approaches is summarized and presented for the purpose of demonstrating how situational and transitional approaches to leadership may enhance the selection and use of evaluation approaches that are inclusive of and responsive to disability and culture.

From this analysis emerged four over-arching approaches to evaluation, each varying in degree of responsiveness to disability and culture. Further, when examining how evaluation interfaces with leadership, some approaches were found to be better aligned with particular evaluation processes and differed in responsiveness to disability and culture.

To date, little research has been conducted on the interface between leadership and evaluation approaches or on the degree to which leaders' implementation of responsive evaluation approaches results in improved outcomes for students with disabilities and those from underrepresented backgrounds. This article provides a conceptual framework for future research examining the degree to which one’s assumptions about the interface between leadership and responsive evaluation approaches can be demonstrated empirically.

Four recommendations are provided for leaders: the need to employ multiple evaluation methods that align their purposes, questions and methods; the need to recognize the possibilities and limits of evaluation approaches in light of their responsiveness to disability and culture; the utility of situational and transitional approaches to leadership in the evaluation process; and the critical importance of including stakeholders from diverse backgrounds in the evaluation process.

Varied approaches to evaluation in educational settings have been extensively studied and discussed. However, few articles have examined the responsiveness of evaluations to the unique conditions that disability and cultural differences represent. The contribution of this article offers a situated synthesis of approaches to evaluation, specifically contextualized within a leadership framework, to better understand how evaluation approaches impact those with disabilities and cultural differences and the inclusion of broad groups of stakeholders. As such, this article lays the foundation for a comparative international conversation exploring how evaluation and leadership approaches responsively interface with disability and culture through inclusion and enfranchisement of stakeholders.

The study examines the amplifying role of users in the e-healthcare sector and holistically show its current state and potential. The paper aims at contributing to the scientific literature with a comprehensive review of the current state of the art on the application of user innovation (UI) in the e-healthcare sector, as a solid step for discussing the potential, trends, managerial gaps and future research avenues in this field. Despite the crucial importance of the topic and increasing attention toward it in the last few years, there is a lack of comprehensive scrutiny on different angles of involving users in health technology innovations so far.

This study combines two methods of bibliometric analysis and extensive content analysis of 169 journal articles on Scopus and Web of Science to unfold five research questions regarding the mechanisms of involving users, innovations characteristics and the role of users throughout the innovation process.

A clear result of the applied methodology is the profiling of users involved in e-health innovations in seven categories. The results of this study shed light on the current practice of not involving users in all the stages of the innovation process of m-health, telemedicine, self-managing technologies, which is contrary to the best practices of the UI application.

Collection of relevant studies due to lack of comprehensibility of the keywords.

The offered propositions can act as a roadmap to potential research opportunities as well as to organize such innovations from a managerial perspective in particular healthcare organization managers and the middle managers operating at R&D sectors and policymakers.

This study is the first of its kind that digs out the application of UI strategies such as user-centered design in the context of e-healthcare and provides a bibliometric and extensive content analysis of the studies conducted in this theme over the years.