Age differences within the yo-yo trend in IQ, caused when aging norms that produce inflated scores are replaced with new norms, were examined using longitudinal WISC, WISC-R and WISC-III records of students tested for special education services from 10 school districts. Descriptive and individual growth modeling analyses revealed that while the…

Educators of professionals often want to determine the quality of student performance and its impact on those they serve. Performance assessment in the education of teachers, medical practitioners, and counselors, for example, currently receives much discussion and debate in the literature (Vaugh & Everhart, 2004; Howley, 2003; and, Urbani et al.,…

This paper offers a critical discourse analysis of a life skills career education curriculum for schools in British Columbia, Canada. This curriculum calls for the development of a set of life skills that are positioned as central to students' employability. At the heart of the curriculum is a focus on personal development, in particular, the need…

The purpose of this research is to understand the relationship between human development in older adults and personal learning. Personal or self-directed learning (SDL) refers to a style of learning where the individual directs, controls, and evaluates what is learned. It may occur with formal classes, but most often takes place in non-formal…

This research uses the National Child Development Study to investigate the effects of adult learning upon 12 outcomes that act as proxies for health and social capital. To minimise selection bias we consider changes in outcomes rather than levels. We find that adult learning plays an important role in contributing to the small shifts in attitudes…

This article describes the main findings of a study of youth theatre commissioned by the National Association of Youth Theatres (NAYT), funded by Arts Council England (ACE) and carried out by the Centre for Applied Theatre Research (CATR). The study explored the impact of taking part in youth theatre on young people's personal and social…

From a life-stage perspective, the purpose of this study was to examine the motivation of female students in midlife to enroll in an undergraduate or graduate program and the meaning they attach to higher education (HE) in general. An additional purpose was to reveal these women's subjective perceptions of the benefits they gained from HE at this…

This chapter provides a broad overview of the benefits attained by SI leaders as a result of their participation in SI leadership activities.

The rapid growth in the number of older adult learners presents new challenges and opportunities for adult educators. These include facilitating the development of individuals as they make the transition to their later years and of American society as it struggles to reenvision aging.

In this paper, we explore the rationale, process and outcomes of the Regional Interoperability Project on Progression for Lifelong Learning, a project that established a model of cross-sector collaboration in personal development planning technology in the UK. With specific reference to the widening participation agenda, and grounded in the…

A selective literature review of publications on life review generated ideas on implementation, theory, research, and therapy. The review begins by differentiating life review from reminiscence, and summarizing ways to conduct a life review. A dozen theories that have been influenced by the life review technique are presented, with a focus placed…

This article considers university staff's place in students' worlds from a psychodynamic perspective. It looks at "studenthood" as a psychological stage, in which relationship to university and university staff is seen as being recruited into a personal developmental context. It sketches some psychodynamic background for understanding the role…

To meet ordinary pre-school expectations, a child has to have acquired the ability to focus and attend to another person and to engage easily and warmly--exchanging simple, friendly gestures, smiles, head nods, emotional expressions, and meaningful sounds. He or she must be able to communicate, show another person what she wants and take the next…

This article, using a controlled design, reports the results of an exploratory study to investigate the impact of two types of intervention strategies (cognitively vs. emotionally focused) on two types of identity processes (self-construction and self-discovery) in a culturally diverse sample of 90 emerging adult university students. A…

Research over the past two decades has demonstrated that individuals are better at recognizing and discriminating faces of their own race versus other races. The own-race effect has typically been investigated in relation to recognition memory; however, some evidence supports an own-race effect at the level of perceptual encoding in adults. The…