PAIRED COMPARISON EVALUATIONS OF MANAGERIAL EFFECTIVENESS BY PEERS AND SUPERVISORS

Paired comparison evaluations were solicited for a relatively small group ( N = 20) of savings and loan association branch managers. Peer evaluations were obtained from 16 of these managers; supervisory evaluations were obtained from 4 officers. Inter-judge agreement (both within and between groups) was high. Further, this agreement extended beyond the derived paired comparison score to certain independently measured psychological characteristics of the persons evaluated. The peer-generated evaluations assisted the officers in making acceptable promotional decisions. In addition, discussion by the 4 officers of differences between their independently made evaluations made explicit a previously covert but potentially important difference in perspective about the determinants of managerial effectiveness. Ratings assigned by one officer reflected his implicitly heavy weight to human relations skill as a component of branch manager effectiveness; those assigned by the other 3 tended to give more weight to knowledge about financial matters related to the savings and loan industry.     

THE MINIATURE JOB TRAINING AND EVALUATION APPROACH: ADDITIONAL FINDINGS

Miniature job training and evaluation situations were developed and administered to 1034 "low aptitude" Navy recruits. Checklist criterion data describing the on-the-job performance of the sample were collected after the recruits were on their fleet assignments: (1) nine months, and (2) 18 months. The results confirmed prior findings relative to the predictive validity of the miniature job training and evaluation approach and supported contentions favoring the power of the concept over a paper-and-pencil testing approach.     

Truth, Thinking, Testimony and Trust: Alvin Goldman on Epistemology and Education

In his recent work in social epistemology, Alvin Goldman argues that truth is the fundamental epistemic end of education, and that critical thinking is of merely instrumental value with respect to that fundamental end. He also argues that there is a central place for testimony and trust in the classroom, and an educational danger in over-emphasizing the fostering of students' critical thinking. In this paper I take issue with these claims, and argue that (1) critical thinking is a fundamental end of education, independently of its instrumental tie to truth, and (2) it is critical thinking, rather than testimony and trust, that is educationally basic.