Economics is a building block for additional business knowledge. In most business curricula, the principles of economics sequence is a prerequisite for further business study. Economists have their own ideas of which economic concepts are most valued by business peers, but the authors are unaware of any published study which specifically asks…

Criticism of the public schools has been unrelenting since "A Nation at Risk" was published in 1983. From that pivotal moment to the present the business community has played a crucial role in setting the parameters of the critique of the schools and shaping the reform agendas that have been proposed and implemented. However, this author has found…

This article is about the feelings of powerlessness that professionals feel to cure learning disability and to answer questions such as "why do I have a learning disability?". We describe how Emma showed us through role play what it was like to have learning difficulties. This article is interesting to people with learning disabilities because…

Toward the end of his life, George Herbert Mead developed a theory of perspectives that may be used to reinterpret his social, developmental psychology. This paper attempts such a reinterpretation, leading to the emergence of a theory of perspective taking in early childhood that looks quite different from that which is assumed in most extant work…

This study investigated the development of perceptual, cognitive, and affective perspective taking in 167 kindergarten through sixth grade children. Task intercorrelations were low, nonsignificant, and inconsistent, supporting the view that perspective taking is a multidimensional social-cognitive construct. (JMB)

This paper reports two studies designed to investigate the relationship between conceptions of distributive justice and perspective taking in preschool children. Subjects in the first study were 39 white, middle-class 4- and 5-year-old children. They were administered a concrete object form and an abstract picture form of a perceptual role-taking…

It was hypothesized that women in different current life circumstances would emphasize different life content areas in verbal reports of their life histories. A basically homogeneous sample of 30 women (average age = 58.5) was divided into women who had never had children, women whose children had left home, and women who had at least one child…

The mediational linkage between class inclusion and role-taking skills was investigated by studying the effects of a successive perspective-taking training technique on the consolidation of class inclusion structures. Sixty preoperational Irish boys were given two pretest measures of class inclusion and two of role-taking. They were then grouped…

This training study investigated the relation between class inclusion and role-taking in elementary school children. The objectives were: (1) to establish the asynchrony between class inclusion and role-taking on an Irish sample and a French sample of preoperational children, and (2) to investigate whether this asynchrony is merely a function of…

A group of 45 undergraduates discussed a moral issue with a confederate who had the same opinion (no-controversy) or opposite opinion (controversy). Subjects in the controversy conditions were induced to have a high level of defensiveness by a disconfirmation of personal competence or a low level of defensiveness by a confirmation. Subjects in…

This study is necessarily exploratory with regard to action-oriented dimensions in educational contexts. Author hypothesizes that those subjects rated most highly functioning on selected dimensions will be rated as making the most significant contribution to learning of other group members. Those rated least effective will be least helpful in…

Describes the nature and importance of role taking (taking the perspective of others) and illustrates how students' role-taking ability might be measured. (DD)

The relationship between children's perceptual, cognitive, and affective perspective-taking scores and their cognitive perspective-taking scores gathered one year later was assessed. Subjects were 56 kindergarten through third-grade children. (Author/JMB)

Analyzes the construct of leadership embodied in management literature and the emphasis placed on training for leadership in organizations. Contrasts social work's past history of leadership with the present gap in leadership development. Proposes ways to strengthen education for leadership in schools of social work. (Author/ABB)