Through the Dąbrowski Lens: A Fresh Examination of the Theory of Positive Disintegration

D?browski’s theory of positive disintegration is an emotion-centered, nonontogenetic, five-level theory of personality development where the experience of all emotions is essential for the process of growth. In this article, we examine the complexities of the three factors of development, which are essential to the notion of development within the theory of positive disintegration. We elaborate on the relationships between these factors, depict the processes and interactions in a new graphical framework, provide associated explanations, and support these by additional references to D?browski’s original writings.     

Children’s rights in education research: from aims to outcomes

One approach to children’s rights in research is to adopt a methodology that focuses on eliciting children’s perspectives. Ensuring representative participation from all children allows a diversity of contexts to be reflected in the results, and points to ways in which improvements can be made in specific settings. In cultural contexts where participation in decision-making is not a traditional role for children, their viewpoints are likely to provide results that highlight differences between cultural norms and children’s rights, and can offer an important focus of dialogue among stakeholders. It is proposed that children’s rights can therefore become integral to the whole process of a quantitative research project. This paper describes such an approach used in a Pacific Islands study, which investigated the quality of schooling through a probability-based sample survey of 1560 children in the first three years of formal education in 55 schools in Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands and Kiribati.     

Teaching Criminal Justice Online: Current Status and Important Considerations

The most significant change to impact the pedagogy of criminal justice students in recent years has been the development of online classes. Online coursework is now a commonly accepted method of accessing criminal justice students and the sustained growth in online classes is expected to continue in the future. However, there is currently a lack of research that focuses on online classes in criminal justice. In response, we present and assess the modest literature regarding criminal justice online classes and highlight important themes. This leads into a presentation of important considerations along the following pedagogical continuum: Planning the online course (i.e. asynchronous timing, technological developments), implementing the online course (i.e. maintaining an online presence, managing student interactions and expectations), and identifying effective means to measure learning outcomes (i.e. measuring success, quality matters). Policy implications for online coursework that are likely to impact future criminal justice educational practices are then discussed.     

Propagation from the start: the spread of a concept-based instructional tool

We describe the propagation of a technology-based educational innovation through its first 3 years of public use. The innovation studied is the Concept Warehouse (CW), a database-driven website developed to support the use of concept-based pedagogies. This tool was initially developed for instructors in undergraduate chemical engineering courses, but has spread to other disciplines as well. In this time, it has grown to over 650 registered instructors representing over 170 institutions. While this study is specific to a particular case, the intent of this article is to provide an exemplar of real-time propagation that informs other researchers and developers. We frame our analysis with Diffusion of Innovation Theory and use a design research methodology that focuses on communication channels, types of knowledge, and stages of the innovation-decision process. Data sources include usage records and survey responses which are analyzed with network diagrams and non-parametric statistics. We find that in comparison to mass media, interpersonal communications tended to result in higher proportions of how-to knowledge and implementation. Three types of opinion leaders were identified through user data and network diagrams. All played critical roles in the tool’s propagation, especially the project collaborators—opinion leaders who actively promoted the CW, in part, because it also propagates their own innovations. Finally, users with self-identified prior principles knowledge showed statistically significantly greater progress in gaining how-to knowledge, but no significant difference in progressing to the implementation stage of the innovation-decision process when compared to users without.     

Understanding students’ experiences of professionalism learning: a ‘threshold’ approach

Professionalism is a core element of curricula in many disciplines but can be difficult to teach and learn. This study used audio-diary methodology to identify professionalism threshold concepts in a small group learning setting in undergraduate medicine and to understand factors that might facilitate students to ‘get’ such concepts. Fifteen students and seven tutors kept audio-diaries over two terms. Data were analysed qualitatively for content. The key themes were then cross referenced to threshold concept criteria (e.g. where language indicated that learning was troublesome, integrative or transformative). Seven potential threshold concepts were identified which centred on students’ developing professional identities including working with uncertainty, considering the bigger picture, not needing to know everything and professional culture. Reflection on workplace experiences within a small group helped students ‘get’ these concepts. The study concludes that threshold concepts and audio-diaries are useful tools for understanding lived experiences of professionalism learning.     

Policy learning and innovation theory: an interactive and co-evolving process

This paper explores links between the development of innovation theory since the late 1970s, and the evolution of innovation policy ideas, primarily in the 1990s. The argument is that there is a close connection between theory and policy, so that theory and policy learning can be seen as an integrated, co-evolving and interactive process. We analyse the theory-policy learning link in terms of two phases. We suggest that the complex economic crisis of the 1970s created an opening for rival analyses of events. During the 1980s, the development of evolutionary theories (pioneered by Nelson and Winter) and of empirically-based theories of the innovation process (pioneered by Nathan Rosenberg) created a framework in which policy agencies could consider heterodox ideas concerning objectives and instruments of public policy. By the early 1990s policy-makers, particularly in Europe, came to see RTD and innovation policies not just as important arenas of action in themselves, but as instruments towards more wide ranging policy objectives. The policy agencies involved, though hierarchical, were characterised by relatively open structures that permitted a degree of intellectual diversity: so organisations like the OECD and the European Commission played a central role, whereas the World Bank, for example, did not. Increasing policy interest stimulated a second phase of research in the 1990s, sponsored both nationally and by various EU programmes, in which expanding the innovation-oriented knowledge base became a significant objective for policy-makers. The paper argues that the theory-policy link has been central to the intellectual development of this field, which would have been impossible within the constraints of existing disciplinary structures and university funding systems. At the same time the analytical achievements have permitted a wide expansion in the conceptualization of policy targets and in the design of instruments available to policy-makers. In a sense, this is itself an evolutionary story: of a crisis and a conjunctural niche that permitted the creation and (so far) survival of a set of diverse and certainly non-conventional ideas.     

Preschoolers' quarantining of fantasy stories

Preschool‐aged children are exposed to fantasy stories with the expectation that they will learn messages in those stories that are applied to real‐world situations. We examined children’s transfer from fantastical and real stories. Over the course of 2 studies, 3½‐ to 5½‐year‐old children were less likely to transfer problem solutions from stories about fantasy characters than stories about real people. A combined analysis of the participants in the 2 studies revealed that the factors predicting transfer differed for the fantasy and real stories. These findings are discussed within the context of their implications for preschoolers’ developing boundaries between fantasy and real worlds.     

Harnessing technology to improve formative assessment of student conceptions in STEM: forging a national network

Concept inventories, consisting of multiple-choice questions designed around common student misconceptions, are designed to reveal student thinking. However, students often have complex, heterogeneous ideas about scientific concepts. Constructed-response assessments, in which students must create their own answer, may better reveal students' thinking, but are time- and resource-intensive to evaluate. This report describes the initial meeting of a National Science Foundation-funded cross-institutional collaboration of interdisciplinary science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education researchers interested in exploring the use of automated text analysis to evaluate constructed-response assessments. Participants at the meeting shared existing work on lexical analysis and concept inventories, participated in technology demonstrations and workshops, and discussed research goals. We are seeking interested collaborators to join our research community.     

Drivers of illicit drug use regulation in Australian sport

Most Australian sport stakeholders not only believe that government regulation is a good thing, but also assume that intervention in the drug-use problem will improve sport's social outcomes and operational integrity. In this paper we examine the regulation of illicit drug use in Australian sport through an interrogation of two cases: the Australian Football League and the National Rugby League. Using Pierre Bourdieu's conceptual frames of social field, capital, and habitus, we aim to secure a clearer understanding of the drivers of Australian sport's illicit drug regulations by (1) identifying those stakeholders who set the drug regulation agenda, (2) revealing the values and dispositions that underpin these regulations, and (3) explaining how dominant stakeholders go about sustaining their position and marginalising those stakeholders with opposing drug regulation claims. Our results show that Australian sport's drug-use regulations are driven by a set of values and dispositions that views sport as an instrument for shaping the character of its participants, and drugs as a threat to sport's moral fabric and good standing. The dominant stakeholders, comprising the Commonwealth Government, its sport agencies, and the major governing bodies for sport, imposed these values and dispositions on peripheral stakeholders by designing a drugs-in-sport social field that yielded capital and power to only those participants who endorsed these values and dispositions. Peripheral stakeholders – including players, their agents, and drug-treatment professionals – who mostly shared different values and dispositions, were sidelined, and denied the opportunity of adding to their already limited supplies of capital, power, and policy making influence.