Of late, South African higher education sectors have been engulfed with spontaneous and frequent protests by students. These protests have often led into violence and horrifying physical injuries to some victims, some victims being students, while some are members of the public. Amongst others, the latest episodes of the #FeesMustFall movement and…

Many schools have problem-solving teams that support teachers by helping identify and resolve students' academic and social problems. Although research is limited, it has been found that teams sometimes fail to implement problem-solving processes with fidelity, which may hinder the resolution of problems. We developed the Team-Initiated Problem…

Psychological intuitions about natural category structure do not always correspond to the true structure of the world. The current study explores young children's responses to conflict between intuitive structure and authoritative feedback using a semi-supervised learning (Zhu et al., 2007) paradigm. In three experiments, 160 children between the…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to develop a conceptual model that uses dialectical inquiry (DI) to create cognitive conflict in strategic decision-makers for the purpose of improving strategic decisions. Activation of the dialectical learning process using DI requires strategic decision-makers to integrate conflicting information causing…

In this study, the effect of conflict theory based decision making skill training group applications on decision making styles of adolescents was investigated. A total of 36 students, including 18 students in experimental group and 18 students in control group, participated in the research. When assigning students to experimental group or control…

Developmental studies on heuristics and biases have reported controversial findings suggesting that children sometimes reason more logically than do adults. We addressed the controversy by testing the impact of children's knowledge of the heuristic stereotypes that are typically cued in these studies. Five-year-old preschoolers and 8-year-old…

This study examined relationships among dysfunctional career thoughts and levels of communication apprehension. Undergraduate students, 88 women and 87 men, completed the Career Thoughts Inventory (CTI; J. P. Sampson, G. W. Peterson, J. G. Lenz, R. C. Reardon, & D. E. Saunders, 1996) and the Personal Report of Communication Apprehension…

This study examines how a group's dynamic changes under the influence of different leadership styles, and determines what leadership style works best in a large group expedition. The main question identified was "What roles can a leader play in affecting the dynamic of a large group while partaking in a field expedition?" The following…

In this study the reflection-in-action of experienced school principals was investigated. While reflection-on-action occurs after-the-fact, reflection-in-action is situated in the context of action. This qualitative study explores what principals think about as they are in the midst of dealing with an unexpected public confrontation. The purpose…

Popular reasoning theories postulate that the ability to inhibit inappropriate beliefs lies at the heart of the human reasoning engine. Given that people's inhibitory capacities are known to rise and fall across the lifespan, we predicted that people's deductive reasoning performance would show similar curvilinear age trends. A group of children…

The research reported in this paper aimed to examine the relationships between decisiveness in social relationships, and the decision-making styles of a group of university students and to investigate the contributions of decision-making styles in predicting decisiveness in social relationship (conflict resolution, social relationship selection…

This article presents a case study at Oakmont University where a presidential debate will be held on campus. Oakmont University is a large public research institution located in the Southeastern United States. This Carnegie Doctoral/Research I institution enrolls more than 35,000, 75% undergraduate and 25% graduate students. Located in somewhat of…

One of the most visible and widespread of the current educational reforms is the attempt to decentralize authority to schools and to involve teachers and others in shared decision making. Often occurring together as site-based shared decision making (SBDM), this reform is turning out to be more difficult to implement than once thought. Few noted…

This article focuses on the following areas of group process: the nature of the task group, the steps taken to reach a decision, and the ways in which a leader can effectively manage the inevitable conflict that emerges within groups as the problem-solving process progresses. (CT)

Outlines some of the principles and conditions of effective library decision making in a group context, drawing on the research and theory literature of management and the psychology of group decision processes. Various decision-making strategies are discussed and 44 references are included. (Author/JL)