Participation in society is increasingly dependent on educational achievement. Accordingly, society as a whole is committing more resources to education to prevent the adverse outcome of students moving through the school system only to emerge without the knowledge and skills that they might be expected to attain. In this paper, we explore the…

Inductive generalization, where people go beyond the data provided, is a basic cognitive capability, and it underpins theoretical accounts of learning, categorization, and decision making. To complete the inductive leap needed for generalization, people must make a key "sampling" assumption about how the available data were generated.…

Two studies investigate subjective wellbeing (SWB) homeostasis. The first investigates the contribution of job satisfaction (JS) and partner satisfaction (PS) to the homeostatic defense of SWB. The extant model of homeostasis does not include either variable. The second study investigates the relationship between Homeostatically Protected Mood…

In this study we bring together Argyris and Schön's theories of interpersonal effectiveness and research on negotiation to develop a model of effective leadership behavior in conversations involving actual or anticipated disagreement. A concurrent mixed-methods design was used to assess shifts in how 18 Australian superintendents responded to…

Working memory updating (WMU) has been identified as a cognitive function of prime importance for everyday tasks and has also been found to be a significant predictor of higher mental abilities. Yet, little is known about the constituent processes of WMU. We suggest that operations required in a typical WMU task can be decomposed into 3 major…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper was to posit and test hypotheses concerned with relationships between teachers' demographics, locus of control and career stages. Design/methodology/approach: A sample consisting of 416 Australian non-executive high school teachers was gathered from 40 randomly selected high schools. Multilevel regression…

Describes the Death Threat Index and its underlying theoretical base and procedure. Suggests if the procedure is varied slightly, a more qualitative picture of a subject's construct of death is possible. The significance of the complexity and individuality of death constructs for death education programs is considered. (Author/JAC)

Reported are four studies of the development of moral autonomy among 720 individuals ranging in age from 12 to 21 years. A questionnaire and a focused interview technique were used to find indications of autonomy in moral judgments and the justifications for these judgments. Tasks elicited moral decisions in the areas of child rearing, schools,…

This study analyzed the Tertiary Admission Examination and Australian Scholastic Aptitude Test results for 264 pairs of 17-year-old monozygotic and dizygotic twins in Western Australia to determine if examination performance is influenced by environmental or genetic factors. Purely environmental models are rejected as inadequate explanations of…