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.     

Social Skills Training To Improve Job Maintenance

A social skills training procedure, which included videotaped feedback, videotaped modeling, focused instructions, coaching, and behavioral rehearsal, was implemented. Treatment effectiveness was evaluated and the results indicate that social skills training can be an effective treatment for job-related stress.     

FURTHER WITHIN-SETTING EMPIRICAL TESTS OF THE SITUATIONAL SPECIFICITY HYPOTHESIS IN PERSONNEL SELECTION

The situational specificity hypothesis in personnel selection holds that variation in observed validity coefficients across studies for the same test and job is due to subtle variations from setting to setting in what constitutes job performance. This hypothesis therefore predicts that, if the setting does not vary, validity will not vary. Using data from a single large-sample validity study ( N = 1,455), this research generated numerous small-sample studies for which the setting (organization, job, test, criterion measure, applicant pool, time period, and sample size) was held constant. It was found that even under these circumstances there was substantial variability across studies in (a) observed validity coefficients, (b) significance levels, and (c) (using traditional data analytic methods) conclusions about the presence or absence of validity. These findings disconfirm the situational specificity hypothesis and argue strongly against traditional data-analytic procedures and the practice of reliance on single small-sample studies. In contrast to the erroneous conclusions produced by traditional data-analytic procedures, meta-analytic methods correctly estimated the population observed validity at .22 and correctly indicated that all between-study variance in observed validities was due to sampling error alone.     

ORGANIZATIONAL PERFORMANCE AND ORGANIZATIONAL LEVEL TRAINING AND SUPPORT

The present study uses both objective and survey data to examine relations among retail sales training, organizational support, and store performance and to examine whether training interacts with organizational support to predict store performance. The study is unique in that it presents an example of the analysis of the relationship between organizational level measures of training and performance, as opposed to more traditional individual level measures. Archival data in a correlational design were analyzed for 62 stores belonging to the same international merchandising firm. Two measures of training and two measures of support were used to predict two measures of store performance. Results indicated that training and organizational support were significantly correlated with both measures of store performance, although the relationship between training and organizational performance was stronger. In contrast to predictions, there were no significant interactions between the training and support variables.     

Rights-talk Will Not Sort Out Child-abuse: comment on Archard on parental rights

ABSTRACT  Argument about Rights can be either purely formal or substantial—meant to affect conduct. These two functions, which need different kinds of support, often become confused. The source of much confusion is the idea that rights-language is an all-purpose 'moral theory' which is in competition with others such as Utilitarianism. Since these are not really rivals but complementary aspects of moral thinking—parts of it, both of which need to be used along with many others—attempts to establish one of them as sole ruler are doomed to incoherence. The ambition to deploy an all-purpose thought-system is distinct from the moral motivation to change the world, and the two aims inevitably interfere with one another. Among these 'moral theories', however, the language of rights is specially ill-suited for all-purpose use. This becomes plain when philosophers, taking its adequacy for granted, conduct moral argument in terms of it alone, as if it were obviously appropriate, without background discussion. Rights-language is of particularly limited use because it is simply the most competitive and litigious of such thought-systems. Its win-or-lose formula allows no more scope for doing justice to defeated claims than a lawcourt does. For the serious conflicts of value that underlie large moral problems, this is disastrous.