The integration of research and practice is of concern in all helping professions. Has social work become an evidence-based profession as some claim? Characteristics of current-day social work are presented that dispute this view, related continuing concerns are suggested, and promising developments (mostly outside social work) are described that…

This paper empirically investigates elder care nurses' negative knowledge. This form of experiential knowledge is defined as the outcome of error-related learning processes, focused on how something is not, on what not to do in certain situations or on deficits in one's knowledge or skills. Besides this definition, we presume the existence of…

The recent increase in short messaging system (SMS) text messaging, often using abbreviated, non-conventional "textisms" (e.g. "2nite"), in school-aged children has raised fears of negative consequences of such technology for literacy. The current research used a paradigm developed by Dixon and Kaminska, who showed that exposure to phonetically…

Certain misunderstandings in science, mathematics, and computer programing reflect analogous underlying difficulties. These misunderstandings are examined through four knowledge levels: (1) content; (2) problem-solving; (3) epistemic; and (4) inquiry. Analysis of several examples shows that misunderstandings have causes at multiple levels, and…

Diagnosing cognitive errors possessed by examinees can be considered as a pattern classification problem that is designed to classify a sequential input of stimuli into one of several predetermined groups. The sequential inputs in this paper's context are item responses, and the predetermined groups are various states of knowledge resulting from…

A theory of how people detect and correct their own performance errors during skill practice is proposed. Blame assignment, error attribution, and knowledge revision are identified as three cognitive functions in explaining error correction. The theory is embodied in a computer model that learns cognitive skills in ecologically valid domains. (SLD)

A survey of 144 first-year law students from 78 undergraduate institutions investigated their level of cultural literacy. On average, students identified 24.1 percent of the 250 test items correctly, with widely varying error patterns by subject. It is concluded that students come to law school without enough factual information about our culture.…