Intellectual Creativity and the Teacher

ABSTRACT Teachers must be trained to recognize the creative student, and we now have some useful materials for this purpose. Four characteristics of intellectual creativity are universality, diversity, its nature as a process, and its dependence on large inputs of information. The creative person is as complex as the creative process, and often possesses contradictory or inconsistent traits. We can encourage creativity through subject-matter instruction, but this requires that teachers be trained to recognize and develop creativity, and be innovative themselves. Teachers need freedom to experiment with the involved concepts of divergent thinking if these are to be developed more fully in school classrooms.     

Stability/Instability in the Alcoholic Marriage: The Interrelationships Between Course of Alcoholism,Family Process,and Marital Outcome

Thirty-one alcoholic families who were originally studied in home, multiple-family group, and laboratory settings were reassessed two years later to determine course of alcoholism and degree of marital stability. This paper presents data comparing baseline alcohol consumption and family interactional behavior at home with subsequent alcoholism and marital stability outcomes. Findings suggest that the relative degree of stability/instability in these marriages is best understood as a function of the “goodness-of-fit” between the relative predictability of drinking on the part of the identified alcoholic and the family's characteristic pattern of interactional behavior at home.     

Theoretical Frameworks for the Study of Structuring Processes in Group Decision Support Systems

Most theoretical perspectives used to explain the use and effects of communication and decision support technologies assume some form of technological determinism. Inconsistencies in the research findings have prompted theorists to reject the assumptions of technological determinism in favor of an emergent perspective. To date, only adaptive Structuration theory (AST) offers the promise of satisfying two requirements for explanation based on an emergent perspective: recursivity and unique effects. The current article reviews the application of AST to the study of a relatively recent technology in the work place—group decision support systems (GDSS). Next it discusses AST's challenge to capture, dynamically and precisely, GDSS processes and outcomes. In response to these concerns, self-organizing systems theory (SOST) is reviewed and applied to problematic areas in GDSS research with the aim of advancing AST.     

The Effects of Vocalics and Nonverbal Sensitivity on Compliance A Speech Accommodation Theory Explanation

A speech accommodation theory explanation for the interaction between a receiver's decoding ability and a speaker's voice tone on compliance with requests for help was tested. It was predicted that good decoders would speak faster than poor decoders. Speech accommodation theory predicts that given this speech style difference, good decoders would make more favorable interpretations of a fast request that converged toward their faster speech rate; whereas poor decoders would make more favorable interpretations of a slow request that converged toward their slower speech rate. Requests receiving more favorable evaluations should result in greater compliance, because compliance with requests for help was predicted to follow an identification process. An experiment involving 168 participants confirmed this explanation. Good decoders spoke faster than poor decoders. Moreover, good decoders rated the fast request as more intimate and immediate, while poor decoders rated the slow request as more intimate and immediate. Good decoders, in turn, complied more with the fast request, which they rated more intimate and immediate, whereas poor decoders complied more with the slow request, which they rated more intimate and immediate.