Caring and Counseling—Shared Tasks in Advisement Schools

Advisement programs, a part of the total guidance service provided by many secondary schools, involve the entire teaching staff and provide personalized guidance services to all secondary students (7–12) in the following areas: program planning, self-assessment, school offerings awareness, parent relations and conferences, feedback evaluation, decision-making skills, career planning and preparation, and school and community issues. Advisement enhances counseling and offers counselors the opportunity to practice their specialized skills more fully. The Ferguson-Florissant advisement program, described in this article, emphasizes positive change in students' attitudes toward themselves and school.     

A Response to Steve Bruce's "Praying Alone?"

This article argues that neither Steve Bruce's theory of secularisation nor Grace Davie's theory of voluntary organisations are needed to explain British attitudes to religious belief and practice.     

Ignoring information in binary choice with continuous variables: When is less “more”?

When can a single variable be more accurate in binary choice than multiple sources of information? We derive analytically the probability that a single variable (SV) will correctly predict one of two choices when both criterion and predictor are continuous variables. We further provide analogous derivations for multiple regression (MR) and equal weighting (EW) and specify the conditions under which the models differ in expected predictive ability. Key factors include variability in cue validities, intercorrelation between predictors, and the ratio of predictors to observations in MR. Theory and simulations are used to illustrate the differential effects of these factors. Results directly address why and when “one-reason” decision making can be more effective than analyses that use more information. We thus provide analytical backing to intriguing empirical results that, to date, have lacked theoretical justification. There are predictable conditions for which one should expect “less to be more.”     

Subjects, networks and positions: Thinking educational guidance differently

This article explores the ways in which framings drawn from post-structuralism can help to inform the understanding of guidance practices. In particular, it draws upon the later work of Foucault and Actor-Network Theory to question the centrality of the humanistic subject predominant within discourses of contemporary guidance and raise issues of power, identity and artefacts in guidance practices. Through these we suggest that guidance can be reframed as a socio-technical web of spatialised knowledge-building practices within wider actions at a distance in the ordering of the social.     

The emergence of personality: Dynamic foundations of individual variation

We conceptualize personality and individual variation from the perspective of dynamical systems. People’s thoughts, feelings, and predispositions for action are inherently dynamic, displaying constant change due to internal mechanisms and external forces, but over time the flow of thought and action converges on a narrow range of states—a fixed-point attractor—that provides cognitive, affective, and behavioral stability. An attractor for personal dynamics develops through two mechanisms: the synchronization of individuals’ internal states in social interaction, and the self-organization of thoughts and feelings with respect to a higher-order property (e.g., goal, self-concept). We present formal models of both processes and instantiate each in computer simulations. Discussion centers on the implications of interpersonal synchronization and self-organization dynamics for issues in personality psychology, including shared vs. non-shared environmental influences on personality development, the expression of personality in social interaction, personal stability vs. change, personal vs. situational causation, and the emergence of self-concept.     

Individual differences in category learning: sometimes less working memory capacity is better than more

We examined whether individual differences in working memory influence the facility with which individuals learn new categories. Participants learned two different types of category structures: rule-based and information-integration. Successful learning of the former category structure is thought to be based on explicit hypothesis testing that relies heavily on working memory. Successful learning of the latter category structure is believed to be driven by procedural learning processes that operate largely outside of conscious control. Consistent with a widespread literature touting the positive benefits of working memory and attentional control, the higher one’s working memory, the fewer trials one took to learn rule-based categories. The opposite occurred for information-integration categories - the lower one’s working memory, the fewer trials one took to learn this category structure. Thus, the positive relation commonly seen between individual differences in working memory and performance can not only be absent, but reversed. As such, a comprehensive understanding of skill learning - and category learning in particular - requires considering the demands of the tasks being performed and the cognitive abilities of the performer.