“Why Give Up Something That Works So Well?”: Retirement Expectations Among Academic Physicians

For individuals with strong work identities, the decision to retire can be particularly challenging. For academic physicians, retirement is an important personal decision that also has far-reaching implications for the healthcare system. This is because academic physicians are responsible for producing the research from which key medical decisions are made, for training future healthcare providers, and for providing specialized care for patients. For this study, we conducted focus groups with academic physicians from a large research university in Canada and then performed inductive thematic analyses to examine perceptions and concerns about later life career transitions. This study highlights tensions between professional experiences for the next generation of physicians and individual struggles with personal identity. Findings suggest improvements to institutional programs that support flexible, agentive, and respectful retirement transitions will not only be beneficial but necessary as medical and university systems continue to grapple with issues of balanced recruitment and succession.     

Total quality management in higher education: Panacea or placebo?

Total Quality Management is a concept that has permeated the thinking of many higher education managers very quickly within the past five years. It is a product of the market ideologies of the 1980s and the managerialism which accompanied them. Nevertheless, despite the special features of higher education as a set of activities based on the creation and dissemination of knowledge and understanding, the paper argues, largely by reference to the subsequent articles, that the main themes of TQM, continuous quality improvement, consistency of quality, staff (and student) participation, meeting customer needs, coordination, and management procedures which detect poor quality and stimulate good, all have a significant contribution to make to the development of efficient and effective mass higher education systems and institutions, whether or not they are explicitly market oriented.     

Teaching learning disabled adolescents to think critically using a problem‐solving schema

Abstract

In this study we describe and examine the effectiveness of an instructional program designed to teach learning disabled adolescents to make better personal decisions. We presented problems in short narratives based on the types of problems these students must solve in their own lives. The program, conducted as part of the students' regular resource room curriculum, incorporated schema‐general questions for problem solving coupled with practice in generating problem‐specific questions to reach an appropriate decision. Participants were 70 resource room students in two large, urban high schools. We employed a pretest‐posttest comparison group design. On the posttest, instructed students performed significantly better on (1) identifying a general schema for making a personal decision and (2) applying the schema to reach appropriate decisions concerning novel problem narratives. The results support the view that application of a general schema to specific problems can be an effective instructional method to improve critical thinking and decision making.