Double narrative of a researcher and the researched: the journey of English-language learning

As I embarked on my PhD study in Australia, I felt excited because my study was born out of reflection on my own journey of English-language learning. I decided to use my experiences as a touchstone for an understanding of the experiences of others like me. The study presented here is part of a larger study and is a double narrative that explores the researcher’s and the four participants’ experiences of learning English language in their home country contexts and also in Australia while they are studying in an Australian tertiary context. Through a reflective practice, I have reflectively studied my and the participants’ experiences with language learning strategies (LLS) to improve English-language skills and to better socialise into Australian academic and social discourses as international students. By linking the researcher and the researched closely, this research makes a contribution to English learning and teaching on the development of English-language skills of international students through the use of LLS. It provides some implications to institutions and advice to students like me.     

Sales Manager Behavior Control Strategy and its Consequences: The Impact of Manager Gender Differences

Salesperson gender studies have consistently reported no differences. In contrast, a single-company study found several differences based on sales manager gender concerning salesperson attitudes, behavior, and outcome (Piercy, Cravens, and Lane 2001). The present research examines the sales manager gender issue across multiple companies from the perspective of sales managers. Sales units led by female managers display higher effectiveness. Female sales managers perform significantly higher levels of behavior-based control activities and display higher competence in this management approach, compared to male counterparts. There are few differences in managers’ assessments of salespersons’ behavior performance based on gender. Female sales managers do not show higher levels of organizational citizenship behavior as part of their management approach. Interestingly, no differences based on gender were found concerning several salesperson and organizational characteristics. These findings suggest that different selling environments are not affecting the study gender results. Several promising future research directions are discussed.     

The other side of rumination: reflective pondering as a strategy for regulating emotions in social situations

Recent studies have questioned the idea of rumination as a unitary dysfunctional process and identified an adaptive subcomponent: reflective pondering. We tested whether reflective pondering could represent an adaptive strategy of regulating emotions, and contrasted it with reappraisal and acceptance, strategies linked to major psychotherapeutic approaches. Participants (103 students) received training in one of these and were exposed to a negative mood induction consisting of social scenarios, both in the presence and in the absence of the specific emotion regulation instruction. Acceptance was more useful than reflective pondering in impacting negative emotions and anxiety. Reappraisal was more efficient than pondering for anxiety. However, moderation analysis showed that social anxiety (SA) levels influenced the comparative efficiency of reappraisal and acceptance as contrasted to reflective pondering for negative emotions and anxiety. Participants low in SA made equal use of all strategies, while for those high in SA reappraisal and acceptance were more efficient than pondering. Our results provide preliminary evidence that reflective pondering can, in some circumstances, be an adaptive regulation strategy.     

Does Current Social Philosophy Develop Progressively?

This article begins with clarification of the notion of progress. The author believes that it is possible to consider progress objectively, if by progress we understand a positive change in the effectiveness of something. He mentions two types of progress: progress of improvement and progress of augmentation. He then distinguishes evaluative from reflective philosophy. Evaluative philosophy gives answers to the second and third of Kant's famous three questions; reflective philosophy answers the first, dealing with the limits of human knowledge. Progress in evaluative philosophy takes the form of augmentation. But in reflective philosophy it could take the form of improvement. The author believes, however, that it is not an easy task to improve contemporary social philosophy. Three main obstacles are: the “anthropological turn” in philosophy, the challenge of postmodernism, and the turning of social philosophy into a kind of useful knowledge.     

The Wisdom Jar

Abstract

Supervisors can use a wide range of skills and exercises when terminating counseling supervision with supervisees at the end of a practicum class. This article presents an experiential creative activity, the Wisdom Jar, as a metaphor for discussing specific lessons with supervisees. The use of creativity and the integration of symbols and metaphors provided supervisees with images to reflect upon after completing a counseling practicum clinical experience.     

The Relationship Between Personality Traits and Reflective Judgment Among Female Students

Forty-three female undergraduate and graduate students preparing for careers as educators provided Omnibus Personality Inventory and Reflective Judgment Interview data. The sample included 14 seniors, 15 master's candidates, and 14 doctoral candidates. Each educational level group included participants with a range of intellectual disposition scores as measured by the Omnibus Personality Inventory. Scores on six scales of the Omnibus Personality Inventory correlated significantly with Reflective Judgment Interview scores (p < .05): thinking introversion, response bias, altruism, autonomy, complexity, and theoretical orientation. These findings support the conclusion that postformal reasoning, as described in P. M. King and K. S. Kitchener's (1994) reflective judgment model of cognitive development, is related to measurable personality traits.     

Rationality and bounded information in repeated games, with application to the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma

Actions in a repeated game can in principle depend on all previous outcomes. Given this vast policy space, human players may often be forced to use heuristics that base actions on incomplete information, such as the outcomes of only the most recent trials. Here it is proven that such bounded rationality is often fully rational, in that the optimal policy based on some limited information about the game's history will be universally optimal (i.e., within the full policy space), provided that one's opponents are restricted to using this same information. It is then shown how this result allows explicit calculation of subgame-perfect equilibria (SPEs) for any repeated or stochastic game. The technique is applied to the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma for the case of 1-back memory. Two classes of SPEs are derived, which exhibit varying degrees of (individually rational) cooperation as a result of repeated interaction.     

What Kind of Normativity is the Normativity of Grammar?

The overall goal of this article is to show that aesthetics plays a major role in a debate at the very center of philosophy. Drawing on the work of David Bell, the article spells out how Kant and Wittgenstein use reflective judgment, epitomized by a judgment of beauty, as a key in their respective solutions to the rule‐following problem they share. The more specific goal is to offer a Kantian account of semantic normativity as understood by Wittgenstein. The article argues that Wittgenstein's reason for describing language as a collection of language games is to allow for a perspective that shows those games as internally purposive without any extralinguistic purpose. This perspective also allows for that union of the general rule and its particular application in practice that the original paradox of rule‐following is wanting.     

Positive education of stoic warriors as reflective practitioners in the profession of arms

This paper traces connections between Stoicism and Positive Psychology for helping to inform and guide the education of warriors in the Profession of Arms. Peterson and Seligman advocate six core virtues and associated character strengths, which the authors illustrate from the practice of leadership education at the Squadron Officer School and The Air University. A synopsis of Costa and Kallick’s Habits of Mind is introduced to illustrate how awareness of the ways virtue and character strengths can guide the reflective warrior with wisdom and determined action. The authors also highlight insights from the work of Chris Argyris and Donald Schön on double-loop learning, reflective-thinking-in-action, and couple those insights with Dietrich Dörners’ emphasis on the advantages of simulations to offer experimentation by practitioners to better prepare them ‘think of, and then do, the right things at the right times and in the right way.’ Finally, a virtual world learning simulation developed by the authors to support student experimentation with double-loop learning on character strengths and habits of mind is described to illustrate the art-of-the-possible for the positive education of stoic warriors.