Internationally, quality assurance schemes persist despite long-standing dissatisfaction and critique of their impact and outcomes. Adopting a critical systems perspective, the article explores the relationships between the knowledge, power and meanings that stakeholder groups bring to the design and implementation of quality assurance systems.…

The development of expertise is seen as a crucial element in higher education, but the nature of expertise has been clouded by assumptions of the centrality of intuition and tacit knowledge. In this paper the authors contend that much knowledge that has been described as tacit can be surfaced for examination through the application of concept…

The effects of attitudes on social memory have not been determined. Some studies have shown attitudes to serve as a heuristic for estimating an answer about past behavior. When an attitude heuristic is applied to recall of an event, "memory" will appear to be "superior," to the extent that the subject's inferences and constructions coincide with…

A metrics and mapping framework is proposed to account for how heuristics, domain-specific reasoning, and intuitive statistical induction processes are integrated to generate estimates. Results of 4 experiments involving 188 undergraduates illustrate framework usefulness and suggest when people use heuristics and when they emphasize…

Provides a conception of critical thinking and the critical thinker, who is characterized by five intellectual resources: background knowledge, operational knowledge of good thinking, knowledge of critical concepts, effective heuristics, and habits of mind. Explains, with examples, each intellectual resource. Discusses the task of teaching…

Attaining the insight needed to solve the Mutilated Checkerboard problem, which requires discovery of an effective problem representation (EPR), is described. Performance on insight problems can be predicted from the availability of generators and constraints in the search for an EPR. Data for 23 undergraduates were analyzed. (TJH)

The strategic learning of college and university students begins with their acquisition of knowledge about their academic context and its learning opportunities and demands. However, traditional assessment measures isolate the student outside of the authentic learning context, which limits the information available from these tests. In contrast,…

Trends in emphases in the study of clinical reasoning are examined, with attention to three major branches of research: problem-solving, knowledge engineering, and propositional analysis. There has been a general progression from a focus on the generic form of clinical reasoning to an emphasis on medical content that supports the reasoning…

Discusses Vee mapping, a technique to assist students in categorizing the relationship between the conceptual and procedural aspects of science. Presents a study to investigate elementary education majors' (n=27) use of the Vee heuristic and concept mapping for the construction of knowledge; attitudes toward learning science in collaborative…