Self‐complexity and Self‐integration: Theory and Therapy in Clinical‐Developmental Psychology

Abstract

The growing field of clinical‐developmental psychology has been influenced by Lawrence Kohlberg's theory of moral judgement. Too literal a use of structural theory, however, has hindered this field's advancement. This paper argues that a new theory of self is required to apply appropriately developmental theory to clinical practice. The model consists of two related dimensions of self: self‐complexity and biographical themes (schemata and themata). A perspective on normal and atypical development given by the interactions between these components is described and implications for practice are discussed.     

Deceptiveness in Co‐operation and Competition

Abstract:

The need for a new role for guidance in secondary schools is stressed. Guidance through the curriculum is presented as a means of stimulating cognitive, moral and ego development by secondary school pupils. An experimental curriculum in moral education is described and evaluated. Highlights of the different phases are presented along with a rationale for this new approach. High school pupils learned the process of moral dilemma discussions, developed counselling and teaching skills and then lead moral dilemma discussions with younger children. The results indicated positive changes by the teenagers on estimates of moral maturity employing the Kohlberg Interviews and Ego Development through the Loevinger test. The results are compared to other current studies and general implications for curriculum development, guidance and moral education are drawn.     

Social and socio‐mathematical norms in collaborative problem‐solving

Based on the notions of social and socio‐mathematical norms we investigate how these are established during the interactions of pre‐service teachers who solve mathematical problems. Norms identified in relevant studies are found in our case too; moreover, we have found norms related to particular aspects of the problems posed. Our results show that most of these norms, once established, enhance the problem‐solving process. However, exceptions do exist, but they have a local orientation and a relatively small influence.

En s'appuyant sur les concepts des normes sociales et ‘socio‐mathématiques’, nous avons étudié comment ces normes se sont établies au cours des interactions entre les enseignants et les étudiants en activité de résolution des problèmes mathématiques. Aux résultats de la recherche apparaissent d'une part les mêmes normes qui ont été déjà remarquées à d'autres recherches relatives et d'autre part des normes liées plus particulièrement aux problèmes posés. Les résultats de la recherche montrent que dans la majorité des cas les normes aident le processus de la resolution des problèmes. Il existe bien sûr des exceptions, mais elles ont une influence et une orientation locale.

Basierend auf den Begriffen der sozialen und sozio‐mathematischen Normen untersuchen wir, wie diese in die Interaktionen von angehenden Lehrern beim Lösen von mathematischen Problemen einfliessen. Normen, welche in relevanten Studien identifiziert werden, wurden in unserem Fall ebenfalls gefunden. Wir haben ausserdem Normen gefunden, welche sich auf bestimmte Aspekte der Fragestellungen beziehen. Unsere Resultate zeigen, dass die meisten Normen, sind sie einmal etabliert, die Problemlösungsprozess verbessern. Es bestehen zwar Ausnahmen, doch diese haben eine lokale Orientierung und einen relativ kleinen Einfluss.

Basados en las nociones de la norma social y sociomatemática, estamos investigando cómo se establecen dichas normas durante las interacciones de los profesores en pre‐servicio, que resuelven problemas matemáticos. Las normas identificadas en estudios relevantes también se encuentran en nuestro caso; de hecho, hemos hallado normas relacionadas con aspectos particulares de los problemas expuestos. Nuestros resultados demuestran que la mayor parte de estas normas, una vez establecidas, mejoran el proceso de solución de problemas. Sin embargo, existen también excepciones pero éstas tienen una orientación local y una relativamente menor influencia.     

Education and school‐to‐work transitions in post‐communist Poland∗

Abstract

Unemployment in Poland rose throughout 1990, 1991, 1992 and 1993 but the proportion of school‐leavers among the unemployed peaked in 1990. Unlike in most western market economies, the best‐ educated young people in Poland did not prove the least vulnerable to unemployment. This paper uses evidence from studies of young people in Gdansk, Katowice and Suwalki to argue that one reason why young people from professional and vocational secondary schools have not borne a heavier share of Poland's unemployment since 1990 has been the flexibility and responsiveness of these schools to Poland's new labour market conditions. Since the reforms many of these schools have contracted drastically. Some have closed. But others have thrived The latter have often benefited from favourable local labour market conditions, but their success has usually been at least equally due to their own resourcefulness in introducing new courses which teach skills that are in demand, and securing various kinds of sponsorship from employers. Three reasons are offered to explain the responsiveness of education in Poland to the changing labour market conditions: general support for ‘the reforms’, the schools’ experience of making informal deals with employers under communism, and the post‐communist authorities’ willingness to force unsuccessful schools to close and to see teachers made redundant.

     

Representing self‐in‐society: education for citizenship and the social‐subjects curriculum in Scotland

The documented social‐subjects curricula for Scottish 5–16 year olds are analysed for representations of ‘self‐in‐society’. Such representations are important in Scotland because it is expected that the new Education‐for‐Citizenship framework will in part be delivered through the social subjects. However, citizenship education is also relevant throughout the UK and beyond and our analysis of the social subjects has wider relevance.

An ideal‐type analysis was used on documents including national guidelines, examination syllabuses, examination papers, and assessor instructions. Our analysis suggests that in these documents: the self is seen as an abstract; people are understood by category; society is the sum of discrete institutions; self‐in‐society is fully defined; and this representation of society is not contested. This representation becomes increasingly exclusive with age/ability and may be linked to assumed modes of curricular division, teaching and assessment. We discuss how this overall picture might affect students’ sense of ‘agency’ in the light of citizenship education. We conclude that the social‐subjects’ curricular representation of self‐in‐society may not fully support the Scottish Education‐for‐Citizenship framework.     

Creative Thinking in Five and Six‐Year‐Old Kindergarten Children

This study was carried out to investigate the effect of age and sex on the creativity of 5 to 6‐year‐old kindergarten children. The total points scored by the 6‐year‐old boys and girls included in this study were found to be higher than those scored by the 5‐y ear‐olds. No significant difference was found between the points scored by the girls and boys. However, the girls did better in flexibility, originality and elaboration and the boys in fluency criterion of creativity.

Children should be helped at home and school to develop their creative power. To achieve this, art, story‐telling, music and drama activities should be an integral part of the school curriculums. During such activities children should be allowed to take their time, and any despotic attitude on the part of the teacher should be avoided. In addition, children should be given a chance with unstructured play materials. Activities should be followed by a discussion with children, who should be taught that things can be done in more ways than one.     

Practice in planning and planning in practice: re‐assessing and clarifying action research in a multi‐national context

This paper responds to a call seeking presenters for an action‐research event for elementary‐school science teachers in Venezuela. The authors planned on the assumption that the participants would wish to leave with plans for introducing action‐research approaches into their practice. In previous writing on action research, the various protocols for action‐research planning and practice emphasize norms and regularities rather more than their opposites. This paper shows, however, that planning is transformed by multiple views of teaching and learning to create a multi‐level, multi‐faceted event within a particular context. The activity of planning parallels the pedagogy enacted in the event. The interactions of presenters and participants, of their purposes and actions, create the complex reality that is action research, where the learning and the events are often asynchronous.     

Learning in and for cross‐school working

In this study we report some of the outcomes of a study of professional learning that took place in cross school partnerships as they worked towards promoting creativity in schools. The methodology developed by Engeström and his colleagues at The Centre for Developmental Work Research in Helsinki was adopted. This form of intervention involves the preparation and facilitation of workshops in which the underlying structural contradictions that are in play in emergent activities are highlighted and articulated in such a way that participants may engage with what may otherwise remain hidden and unexamined tensions. This approach is based on the writings of the early 20th‐century Russian school of social scientists—Vygotsky, Luria and Leontiev. A principal claim is that the development of creativity requires tools and contexts for such innovatory forms of practice. This study suggests that this claim is a partial representation of the development of creative activity.     

Self‐reflection and resilience in educational research

This article revisits the critical realist ethnographic process that was adopted in my doctoral thesis, which was concerned with the experiences of ethnic identity of white British and Pakistani British children as they started kindergarten in the northwest of England. The article focuses on the ethnography that emerged from the visits that I carried out alongside staff to children's homes before they started kindergarten and on the way in which these were portrayed and analysed in the final thesis. I conclude that the process of observation, writing field notes and then producing a fuller ethnography produced a very partial representation of the empirical world. This was problematic in that, in critical realism, what is observed in the world of the ‘empirical’ and considered in the world of the ‘actual’ forms the basis for understanding the underlying causal tendencies which point to the underlying explanatory concepts in the world of the ‘real’. I argue, however, that more careful critical realist ethnography has the potential to be a powerful methodological framework which accepts the contested nature of reality but which, unlike postmodernism, provides a means of addressing possibilities and of moving beyond ‘undecidability’.     

Knowledge and Technique in Statistical Problem‐Solving

Summaries

English

Subjects’ knowledge and technique in statistical problem‐solving, as well as their ability to detect their own problem‐solving errors, were studied. Twenty subjects were asked to solve two statistical problems, and then to explain their solutions to the experimenter. Finally, each subject was asked successively more detailed questions about his/her solution, particularly in reference to its erroneous parts. The results showed that subjects tended to describe rather than explain their solutions. Subjects eliminated three errors (4%) when accounting for their solutions and another 20 errors (24%) in the following interview. About one‐third of all errors were analysed as being due to deficiencies in subjects’ problem‐solving techniques. For 62% of the errors where subjects showed knowledge deficiencies, there were deficiencies in propositional knowledge, i.e. in subjects’ understanding of statistical concepts and their interrelations. The results showed that misunderstandings of concepts and methods of solution were much more common than lack of conceptions as such. In addition, the results suggest that deficiencies in subjects’ problem‐solving are related to motivational factors, such as a tendency to minimize cognitive strain. Pedagogical implications of the results are discussed.     

Self‐esteem in Children with and without Motor Co‐ordination Problems

This article presents results from a study of 36 pupils (8–10 years of age) in face‐to‐face conversations with their teachers about water as an environmental phenomenon based on a photograph of a rainforest. The teachers’ rather vague goal was to have the pupils talk about the water cycle. The sessions were audio‐recorded and analyzed with respect to: (1) scaffolding strategies used by the teachers, (2) possible implications of these strategies on the pupils’ sense‐making, and (3) what accounts of the water cycle as a school‐science learning‐content were made. Three different patterns of scaffolding strategies were found. Some pupils did not even come close to talking about the water cycle, whereas others arrived at a rather fragmented picture.     

Emotional intelligence,self‐efficacy,and coping among Chinese prospective and in‐service teachers in Hong Kong

Emotional intelligence (intrapersonal and interpersonal) and general teacher self‐efficacy were assessed to represent personal resources facilitating active and passive coping in a sample of 273 Chinese prospective and in‐service teachers in Hong Kong. Intrapersonal emotional intelligence and interpersonal emotional intelligence were found to predict significantly active coping strategy, but teacher self‐efficacy did not contribute independently to the prediction of active coping even though there was some evidence that teacher self‐efficacy might interact with intrapersonal emotional intelligence in the prediction of active coping, especially for male teachers. The implications of the findings for preventive intervention efforts to combat teacher stress through teaching to enhance emotional intelligence are discussed.     

Theory and practice in self‐esteem enhancement: Circle‐Time and efficacy‐based approaches—a controlled evaluation

There are differences of opinion about self‐esteem enhancement in the classroom; these differences exist at both conceptual and practical levels. The aim of this study was to ascertain whether techniques employed by primary school teachers as a day‐to‐day part of their teaching can have measurable effects on the self‐esteem of their pupils. Two different approaches to self‐esteem enhancement in primary classes were evaluated. The participants were 519 primary school children and their teachers (n = 21). Circle‐Time and efficacy‐based approaches were compared with a control condition over a four‐month period. On two self‐report measures of self‐esteem, gains were found for both experimental conditions, but not for the controls. Significant sub‐scale differences suggested that the two approaches achieved their effects in different ways, consistent with a two‐dimensional model of self‐esteem. Circle‐Time methodology, focusing on the creation of a climate in which individuals are respected and valued, is more likely to help children to develop a sense of self‐worth. On the other hand, an efficacy‐based approach tends to focus on the achievement of performance goals, and is thus more likely to develop the self‐competence dimension. It is argued that we should now reconsider how we think about self‐esteem enhancement in primary classrooms.     

The appeal of rough‐and‐tumble play in televised professional football

In a factorial design varying (1) the degree of roughness/violence of a play (low, intermediate, and high), (2) several particular plays within this classification, and (3) sex of viewer, the enjoyment of televised plays of professional football was investigated. The plays were taken from a large pool of plays drawn from numerous games and involving numerous teams. In a pretest, a strong differentiation in the selection plays' degree of roughness/violence was secured. At the same time, the plays were matched on several other, potentially contaminating stimulus dimensions. The enjoyment of plays was found to increase with the degree of their apparent roughness/violence. However, this relationship was significant for male viewers only. It was not reliable for females. There were no appreciable sex differences in the enjoyment of plays featuring low and intermediate levels of roughness. Highly violent plays, in contrast, were significantly more enjoyed by males than by females. The findings suggest that, at least for male viewers, a high degree of aggressiveness is a critical ingredient of the enjoyment of watching sports contests.     

Comparison of learning and study strategies of traditional and open‐learning‐system students in Turkey

This study compares the learning and study strategies of the students of the Faculty of Administrative Sciences of Cukurova University taking traditional on‐campus courses and those at the Open Learning Faculty of Anadolu University following an open learning programme. The evaluation was based on the Learning and Study Strategies Inventory (LASSI), developed by Claire E. Weinstein (1987), together with a separate questionnaire to elaborate the findings.

Findings reveal that students of both groups have considerably lower scores, especially in the affective domain, in relation to the other college students answering the same items in previous evaluations. However no important difference has been found between the groups belonging to the traditional and open learning systems evaluated in this study.     

Bachelor‐master programmes in the netherlands and Germany

Abstract

This article compares the results of the implementation of the new bachelor‐master system in the Netherlands and Germany. The Bologna Process presents the common European context for this reform process. However, the respective national contexts differ, and so do the actual implementation processes and the emerging outcomes. For each of the two countries, a limited number of aspects of the reforms that emerged as most relevant are highlighted. In the final section, some commonalities and differences are discussed. The former mainly concern the characteristics of the binary system in both countries and the introduction of accreditation in relation to the bachelor‐master system. With respect to the latter, the implementation strategy and the funding conditions are most strikingly different, related to the fact that in Germany the new system is implemented in parallel with the existing system, whereas in the Netherlands the new system will replace the existing one.     

Evaluation of Affective and Cognitive‐Affective Domains in Socially‐Oriented Innovative Science and Technology Curricula

Summaries

English

The present work is an attempt to contribute to the field of evaluation of the affective domain in socially‐oriented innovative science and technology curricula. The main concern of such curricula is the long‐term development of the student's personality in terms of decision‐making capability, attitudes, intellectual power, and social involvement.

Since it appears that the realistic choice in the evaluation of such curricula is between ‘no measures’ (subjective judgements) and ‘imperfect proxies’, it is proposed to concentrate on finding adequate (and agreeable) measures to evaluate the long‐range intended (but also the unintended) effects of the programmes in hand, and only then to switch to evaluate the effectiveness of the curriculum in achieving these effects (i.e. the educational objectives) in the affective domain. Selected ideas with respect to the above are ‘translated’ here into manageable and applicable procedures within the science class, taking into consideration the ‘local realism of constraints’ within which every science teacher performs.

The development of feasible methods for measurement of curricular outcomes in the affective and affective‐cognitive domains is a precondition for future summative evaluation of socio‐technologically oriented science and technology curricula. Contending with the moral and value‐judgement components of any future science curriculum is therefore the inescapable task ahead.     

Decision‐Making in Future Science and Technology Curricula

Summaries

English

In this article, the author argues in favour of a decision‐making orientated science and technology curriculum for secondary school students. To achieve this, the curriculum should (i) expose students to open‐ended problems within their natural setting, (ii) provide students with real decision‐making situations and (iii) involve them in scientific‐technological social actions, e.g. in community institutions or industrial plants.