Group items tagged

in the basic forms, as well as in the content of people's thinking.

The early 1930

had experienced the conditions necessary to alter radically the content and form of their thought.

we expected that they would display a predominance of those forms of thought that come from activity that is guided by the physical features of familiar objects.

Therefore we began, as most field work with people does, by emphasizing contact with the people who would serve as our subjects. We tried to establish friendly relations so that experimental sessions seemed natural and non-threatening. We were particularly careful not to conduct hasty or unprepared presentations of the test materials.

As a rule, our experimental sessions began with long conversations which were sometimes repeated with the subjects in the relaxed atmosphere of a tea house, where the villagers spent most of their free time, or in camps in the field and in mountain pastures around the evening campfire. These talks were frequently held in groups. Even when the interviews were held with one person, the experimenter and other subjects made up a group of two or three who listened attentively to the person being interviewed and who sometimes offered remarks or comments on what he said. The talk often took the form of a free-flowing exchange of opinion between participants, and a particular problem might be solved simultaneously by two or three subjects, each proposing an answer. Only gradually did the experimenters introduce the prepared tasks, which resembled the “riddles” familiar to the population and therefore seemed like a natural extension of the conversation.

He characterized primitive thinking as “prelogical” and “loosely organized.” Primitive people were said to be indifferent to logical contradiction and dominated by the idea that mystical forces control natural phenomena

We conceived the idea of carrying out the first far-reaching study of intellectual functions among adults from a non-technological non-literate, traditional society

hamlets

nomad

1. Women living in remote villages who were illiterate and who were not involved in any modern social activities. There were still a considerable number of such women at the time our study was made. Their interviews were conducted by women, since they alone had the right to enter the women's quarters. 2. Peasants living in remote villages who were in no way involved with socialized labor and who continued to maintain an individualistic economy. These peasants were not literate. 3. Women who attended short-term courses in the teaching of kindergarteners. As a rule, they had no formal schooling and almost no training in literacy. 4. Active kolhoz (collective farm) workers and young people who had taken short courses. They were involved as chairmen running collective farms, as holders of other offices on the, collective farm, or as brigade leaders. They had considerable experience in planning production, distributing labor, and taking stock of output. By dealing with other collective farm members, they had acquired a much broader outlook than isolated peasants. But they had attended school only briefly, and many were still barely literate. 5. Women students admitted to teachers school after two or three years of study. Their educational qualifications, however, were still fairly low.

Short-term psychological experiments would have been highly problematic under the field conditions we expected to encounter

In the past, we collected information not simply to know things. That was only the beginning. We also collected information to convert it into something larger than facts and ultimately more useful — into ideas that made sense of the information. We sought not just to apprehend the world but to truly comprehend it, which is the primary function of ideas. Great ideas explain the world and one another to us.

These ideas enabled us to get our minds around our existence and attempt to answer the big, daunting questions of our lives.

But if information was once grist for ideas, over the last decade it has become competition for them.

In effect, we are living within the nimbus of an informational Gresham’s law in which trivial information pushes out significant information, but it is also an ideational Gresham’s law in which information, trivial or not, pushes out ideas.

We prefer knowing to thinking because knowing has more immediate value. It keeps us in the loop

For one thing, social networking sites are the primary form of communication among young people, and they are supplanting print, which is where ideas have typically gestated. For another, social networking sites engender habits of mind that are inimical to the kind of deliberate discourse that gives rise to ideas.

Indeed, the gab of social networking tends to shrink one’s universe to oneself and one’s friends, while thoughts organized in words, whether online or on the page, enlarge one’s focus.

But because they are scientists and empiricists rather than generalists in the humanities, the place from which ideas were customarily popularized, they suffer a double whammy: not only the whammy against ideas generally but the whammy against science, which is typically regarded in the media as mystifying at best, incomprehensible at worst. A generation ago, these men would have made their way into popular magazines and onto television screens.

there is a vast difference between profit-making inventions and intellectually challenging thoughts.

There won’t be anything we won’t know. But there will be no one thinking about it.

It’s an attitude that Dr. Khurana first saw in M.B.A. programs but has migrated, he says, to the undergraduate level.

Second, in management and marketing, no strong consensus has emerged about what students ought to learn or how they ought to learn it.

Gains on the C.L.A. closely parallel the amount of time students reported spending on homework. Another explanation is the heavy prevalence of group assignments in business courses: the more time students spent studying in groups, the weaker their gains in the kinds of skills the C.L.A. measures.

The pedagogical theory is that managers need to function in groups, so a management education without such experiences would be like medical training without a residency. While some group projects are genuinely challenging, the consensus among students and professors is that they are one of the elements of business that make it easy to skate through college.

“We’ve got students who don’t read, and grow up not reading,” he says. “There are too many other things competing for their time. The frequency and quantity of drinking keeps getting higher. We have issues with depression. Getting students alert and motivated — even getting them to class, to be honest with you — it’s a challenge.”

“A lot of classes I’ve been exposed to, you just go to class and they do the PowerPoint from the book,” he says. “It just seems kind of pointless to go when (a) you’re probably not going to be paying much attention anyway and (b) it would probably be worth more of your time just to sit with your book and read it.”

“It seems like now, every take-home test you get, you can just go and Google. If the question is from a test bank, you can just type the text in, and somebody out there will have it and you can just use that.”

This is not senioritis, he says: this is the way all four years have been. In a typical day, “I just play sports, maybe go to the gym. Eat. Probably drink a little bit. Just kind of goof around all day.” He says his grade-point average is 3.3.

concrete business skills tend to expire in five years or so as technology and organizations change.

History and philosophy, on the other hand, provide the kind of contextual knowledge and reasoning skills that are indispensable for business students.

when they hand in papers, they’re marked up twice: once for content by a professor with specialized expertise, and once for writing quality by a business-communication professor.

a national survey of 259 business professors who had been teaching for at least 10 years. On average, respondents said they had reduced the math and analytic-thinking requirements in their courses. In exchange, they had increased the number of requirements related to computer skills and group presentations.

what about employers? What do they want? According to national surveys, they want to hire 22-year-olds who can write coherently, think creatively and analyze quantitative data, and they’re perfectly happy to hire English or biology majors. Most Ivy League universities and elite liberal arts colleges, in fact, don’t even offer undergraduate business majors.

Professional activity has become so knowledge-intensive and fluid in content that learning has become an integral and inseparable part of "adult" work activities.

require educational tools and environments whose primary aim is to help cultivate the desire to learn and create, and not to simply communicate subject matter divorced from meaningful and personalized activity.

current uses of technology in education: it is used as an add-on to existing practices rather than a catalyst for fundamentally rethinking what education should be about in the next century

information technologies have been used to mechanize old ways of doing business‹rather than fundamentally rethinking the underlying work processes and promoting new ways to create artifacts and knowledge.

Instructionist approaches are not changed by the fact that information is disseminated by an intelligent tutoring system.

ubstantial empirical evidence that the chief impediments to learning are not cognitive. It is not that students cannot learn; it is that they are not well motivated to learn.

Most of what any individual "knows" today is not in her or his head, but is out in the world (e.g., in other human heads or embedded in media).

challenge of whether we can create learning environments in which learners work hard, not because they have to, but because they want to. We need to alter the perception that serious learning has to be unpleasant rather than personally meaningful, empowering, engaging, and even fun.

making information relevant to the task at hand, providing challenges matched to current skills, creating communities (among peers, over the net), and providing access to real practitioners and experts.

What "basic skills" are required in a world in which occupational knowledge and skills become obsolete in years rather than decades?

"the failures of the institutions responsible for indoctrinating the young."

It's not just you learned how a mosquito flies in the rain, but you learn how to be creative and why it's exciting to learn things and create things and make up new things. And that can be done from kindergarten on

There are a lot of factors. And one of them, probably, is just that students are trapped

First of all, the existence of the advertising industry is a sign of the unwillingness to let markets function. If you had markets, you wouldn't have advertising. Like, if somebody has something to sell, they say what it is and you buy it if you want. But when you have oligopolies, they want to stop price wars

there's no real economic reason for high-priced higher education and skyrocketing student debt

It doesn't matter how much you learn in school; it's whether you learn how to go on and do things by yourself

"The most common implementation of RTI is fairly rigid,"

she said, with schools often using a single test to identify students for Tier 2 and a standard set of interventions once they get there. For example, she noted that the study found that small group instruction and interventions in RTI schools were more likely to focus on phonics for students below grade level than at grade level. "Right there you have a clue that the interventions are focused on these foundational skills and not as much on comprehension," she sai

public void addName(String name) { synchronized(this) { lastName = name; nameCount++; } nameList.add(name); }

Within this scheme, Leviticus presents the humbling of the foreskin of the heart as the resolution to the stubborn heart which brought the people into exile. Heart circumcision will bring the blessing of restoration.

It is in the context of the covenant curses that our reference to heart circumcision occurs in Leviticus 26:41, revealing that Israel had an internal heart problem which led them to curse God and therefore undergo his covenant curses.

Leviticus 26 describes the outworking of the blessing, curse-exile, and return from exile

Deuteronomy presents circumcision of the heart as important means for attaining the Deuteronomic vision of loyalty from a devoted heart.4

59% of musicians in symphony orchestras reported performance anxiety severe enough toimpair their professional and/or personal functioning.

A recent study indicated that MPA is not limited to orchestralmusicians, showing that opera chorus artists are also prone to high levels of performanceanxiety

However, since not allperformers suffer the same degree of MPA, or indeed report the same levels of occupationalstress, individual differences in a range of psychological characteristics are likely to accountfor variations in the degree to which musicians experience symptoms

A large number of treatment modalities (e.g., behavioral, cognitive, pharmacological andcomplementary) has been developed for music performance anxiety (MPA)

However, areview of this literature indicates that the field is still in its infancy with respect to theconceptual and theoretical formulations of the nature of MPA and its empiricalinvestigation.

Anxiety may be triggered by conscious,rational concerns or by cues that trigger, unconsciously, earlier anxiety producingexperiences or somatic sensations.

These findings suggest that multi-modal interventions are needed toaddress the multiple difficulties experienced by test anxious individuals.

with some focusing on behavioral change, some on cognitivechange, others on reduction of physiological symptoms through the use of pharmacotherapy,and some on idiosyncratic formulations

For drug studies, the keywords were beta-blocker [Beta blockers block the effect ofadrenaline (the hormone norepinephrine) on the body’s beta receptors. This slows downthe nerve impulses that travel through the heart. As a result, the resting heart rate is lower,the heart does not have to work as hard and requires less blood and oxygen

Brodsky (1996) and Nube´(1991) were most useful.

The interventionsassessed included systematic desensitization, progressive muscle relaxation, awareness andbreathing and behavioural rehearsal

In summary, behavioral treatments do appear to be at least minimally effective in thetreatment of MPA, although the heterogeneity of the treatment approaches employedmakes it difficult to isolate consistent evidence for the superiority of any one type ofbehavioral intervention

Two studies (see Tables II and IV) assessed the therapeutic effect of cognitive techniquesalone on MPA.

A dissertation by Patston (1996) reported a comparison of cognitive (e.g.positive self-talk, etc.) and physiological strategies in the treatment of MPA. No significantimprovements on vocal and visual manifestations of performance anxiety were found foreither treatment or control groups. However, the sample consisted of only 17 operastudents who were not specifically selected on the basis of their MPA severity, and theintervention was conducted by the author, a singer and teacher, who had no training inpsychology.

Three studies (see Table III) assessed the therapeutic effect of cognitive-behavioralstrategies on MPA. Harris (1987), Roland (1993), and Kendrick et al. (1982) all reportedthat standard CBT techniques were effective in the treatment of MPA in studentsspecifically selected for study because of the severity of their MPA.

Harris (1987) and Roland(1993) reported that CBT led to reductions in state anxiety as measured by the STAI,although Kendrick et al. (1982) failed to find a significant difference between treatment andcontrol groups on this measure.

The evidence for improvements in MPA following CBT is quite consistent, althoughfurther studies with larger samples are needed to confirm this evidence.

Beta-blockers have become increasingly popular among performers in recent years. Forexample, Lockwood (1989), in a survey of 2,122 orchestral musicians, found that 27% usedpropranolol to manage their anxiety prior to a performance; 19% of this group used thedrug on a daily basis.

Nube´ (1991) identified nine studies examining the effects of various beta-blockers(Atenolol, Metopolol, Nadolol, Oxprenolol, Propranolol, Pindolol) on MPA.

The findings regarding the effects of beta blockers on otheroutcome measures were less conclusive.

A rigorous definition of MPA is needed to advance treatment. However, defining MPA as asocial anxiety (social phobia) using criteria set out in DSM-IV-TR (APA, 2000) as theinclusion criteria may be too restrictive, particularly if the musician presenting for treatmentexperiences MPA as a focal anxiety (ie does not meet other criteria for social anxiety).

Few ofthe intervention studies reviewed acknowledged that performers need a certain amount ofarousal or anxiety to maximise their performance.

None of the studies could be pooled in a meta-analysis primarily because too fewprovided sufficient data to calculate effect sizes, use of diverse subject groups andtreatments, duration and intensity of treatment, and use of disparate outcome measures

In conclusion, the literature on treatment approaches for MPA is fragmented, incon-sistent, and methodologically weak. These limitations make it difficult to reach any firmconclusions about the effectiveness of the various treatment approaches reviewed. Forsignificant progress to be made, future research will require a clear definition of MPA,consistency and strength in methodology, and the development of robust and appropriateoutcome measures.