Alternatives to a core curriculum to accomplish broad and general training: A scientist-practitioner perspective.

There has been an historical struggle in professional psychology to provide a broad and general core without identifying the critical components necessary or how these components are linked to educational and professional outcomes. A conceptual model is presented that encourages more creative approaches to broad and general education and provides a theoretical grounding for implementation of alternative approaches that lend themselves to tracking educational outcomes. Alternative methods to ensure broad and general training include (a) a greater attention to preadmission preparation and (b) the use of alternatives to core courses such as menu driven coursework, competency portfolios, and comprehensive examinations. Examples of these methods are presented in detail. Program directors, regulators, and accrediting bodies need to consider this conceptual, outcome driven model, for evaluating programs and graduates with respect to broad and general preparation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Experiential Learning in Engineering Practice

The American Society of Civil Engineers is asserting an increasingly broad and deep body of knowledge (BOK) that reflects contemporary expectations for professional leadership. The BOK is to be fulfilled with a combination of formal education and practical experience. The formal education part includes renewed emphasis on an integrated base of liberal learning, greater technical breadth, specific professional preparation, and mastery of a specialization. Important elements of cognitive development are “assigned” to prelicensure experience. Among these are several learning outcomes critical to realizing the announced vision of the professional for the current century. The current system of prelicensure experience is inadequate and will not perform without structural change. The shortfall lies in the arrangements for fulfilling and validating specific learning outcomes beyond the university. The status quo in engineering is reviewed and compared with other professions. A model program is sketched in terms of specifications and some suggested actions.     

Practitioner and Employer Assessment of ABET Outcome Criteria

The Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) has revised the accreditation criteria that are designed to assure that graduates of accredited programs are prepared to enter the practice of engineering and satisfy industrial requirements. The general criteria also specify that engineering programs must demonstrate that their graduates possess or satisfy eleven (11) educational outcomes generally known as “a” through “k.” This investigation suggests that graduating seniors in civil engineering believe their educational experience has given them a strong background in two of the outcomes required by ABET. These include: (1) an ability to apply knowledge of mathematics, science, and engineering; and (2) an ability to identify, formulate, and solve engineering problems. In contrast, three outcomes received slightly lower ratings from alumni practitioners and employers. These include, a knowledge of contemporary issues; the broad education necessary to understand the impact of engineering solutions in a global/societal context; and an ability to communicate effectively. Overall, the data may suggest that not all ABET educational attributes are considered by graduating seniors in civil engineering, employers, and industrial practitioners, to have the same level of significance and perhaps should not be stressed to the same degree in an engineering program. In this regard, it was found that the scores from a benchmarking study tend to be lower than those of students and practitioners educated at Lamar University Nevertheless, for comparative purposes, the findings of the investigation could be utilized by other institutions and departments that may wish to study and/or assess their curriculum and satisfy ABET criteria.     

Professional development of medical students: problems and promises

Observers and critics of the medical profession, both within and without, urge that more attention be paid to the moral sensibilities, the characters, of medical students. Passing on particular moral values and actions to physicians has always been an essential core of medical training, and this call for renewal is not new in modern medicine. Some of the structures and characteristics of modern medical education, however, often work directly against the professionalism that the education espouses. For example, medical students are socialized into a hierarchy that has broad implications for relations among health care professionals, other health care workers, and patients, and academic medicine has not promoted and taught critical reflection about the values and consequences of this hierarchy. Further, behind the formal curriculum lies the "hidden curriculum" of values that are unconsciously or half-consciously passed on from the faculty and older trainees. Two resources for thinking anew about professional development for medical students are feminist standpoint theory and critical multicultural theory, each of which raises important and fundamental questions about defining the role of medicine in society and the role of the physician in medicine. The author discusses these two theories and their implications for medical education, showing how they can be used to move discussions of professional development into analysis of the widespread social consequences of how a society organizes its health care and into critical reflection on the nature of medical knowledge.     

Higher education and psychology in the millennium.

This article analyzes the present state of higher education and psychology in relation to the future needs of society. On the basis of the assumption that higher education has historically addressed social issues, it is proposed that our educational system and society negotiate a new "contract" that is appropriate to the coming decades. A model of future higher education is described, involving traditional domains of foundational and professional knowledge and a new emphasis on socially responsive knowledge. Examples are given of courses involving socially responsive knowledge in which students study and learn to act on and help resolve social problems. It is recommended that psychology incorporate socially responsive knowledge in its future curriculum, along with the continuation of foundational and professional education and training. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Teaching Engineering Surveying in a Civil Engineering Program: Curriculum, Pedagogy, and Assessment

As engineering surveying is highly concerned with its intensive involvement in the construction of roads and bridges, drainage systems, buildings, railways, and tunnels in civil engineering, the subject of engineering surveying is being offered by the Department of Land Surveying and Geo-Informatics to all undergraduate students who are taking the Bachelor of Civil Engineering Degree Program in the Department of Civil and Structural Engineering at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Under the new outcome-based curriculum and work-integrated education requirements, the curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment for the subject are described here by answering the questions of “what are the goals and objectives of the curriculum,” “what should students learn,” and “how should it be learned, taught, and assessed.”     

The National Council of Schools and Programs of Professional Psychology education model.

Beginning with its historical context, the National Council of Schools and Programs of Professional Psychology's model for education and training in professional psychology is summarized in 5 areas: (a) broadened view of psychology with a flexible epistemology, multiple ways of knowing, and how practitioners doing practice remain local clinical scientists doing disciplined inquiry; (b) integrative pedagogy; (c) competency-based core curriculum integrating practical and scientific knowledge, skills, and attitudes; (d) elements of practice?including multiple roles, the self of the psychologist and reflective practice?practicum and internship training, and systematic evaluation; and (e) the social nature of professional psychology and its social responsibility, including ethnic and racial diversity and gender. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Partial knowledge of abstract words in patients with cortical degenerative conditions.

Partial knowledge is a common but rarely studied consequence of damage to conceptual representations and is characterized by the retained ability to retrieve crude, superordinate information but not specific, detailed information about a conceptual entity. Previous studies have described partial knowledge for concrete items particularly following semantic dementia (SD). The present study was designed to investigate the occurrence of partial knowledge effects in the conceptual domain of abstract words. A novel 3-level synonym comprehension test was administered to 9 patients with SD, 20 patients with probable Alzheimer's disease (AD), and 40 healthy control subjects. All subject groups showed weaker performance on tasks requiring a fine specification of word meaning compared with those for which a broad sense of meaning or valence was necessary. However, this gradient of partial knowledge was significantly greater for SD and AD subjects than for controls. These results demonstrate that partial knowledge is a general property of a degraded knowledge base and is not restricted to the concrete word domain. It constitutes a normal phenomenon that is exacerbated in the context of neurodegenerative disease. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Striving for competence in the assessment of competence: Psychology's professional education and credentialing journey of public accountability.

The history of psychology's development as a licensed profession is traced over the past 60 years through the evolution of the profession's quality control practices in education and credentialing. These two essential features of a profession began at about the same time, but evolved quite independent of one another for the first 30 years. Shaped by events of the 1970s and 1980s, however, there has been a gradual convergence of focus by those responsible for professional education and credentialing on how best to assess the quality of professional education programs and their graduates who apply for licensure. Although at first this focus was predominantly on the content of curriculum taught and the knowledge examined, increasingly over the past decade there has been a shift of emphasis to the broader, more complex construct of competence to practice for which examination of knowledge is a necessary but insufficient assessment. The article describes the events and structures that led to this outcome and concludes with comments about the future. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Educating school psychologists to work with bilingual/bicultural populations.

Describes a university 66-credit professional diploma sequence that includes 1 yr of internship experience for the training of school psychologists to work with bilingual/bicultural populations. Competence for working with these populations involves 3 general areas: language, cross-cultural expertise, and assessment. An integrated curriculum and faculty offers linguistics, cultural-urban studies, and bilingual education courses in addition to the core courses in professional school psychology. Bilingual students and faculty have been recruited. (23 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Integrating Sustainable Design into Architectural Engineering Education: UNL-AE Program

Given the profound impact of the built environment on the resources of the earth, a growing number of institutions of higher education are preparing engineers to make sustainable design a standard in the construction industry. This paper looks at the diverse ways in which education in sustainable design can be integrated into engineering curricula using the architectural engineering (AE) program at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln (UNL) as a case study example. The UNL program is unique in that it prepares students for careers in sustainable development through a curriculum that promotes both traditional and hands-on, experiential learning. Through coursework, research, workshops, student competitions, and even interaction with the UNL engineering facility, students learn how to make our built environment more sustainable. A key facet of this program is to connect the institution with the local community and industry to give students an opportunity to apply skills learned in the classroom to real-world problems in professional settings. Hence, this “green” integration actually takes place on two levels, within the UNL curriculum itself and within the larger context of the community and industry. Together, academia, the industry, and the community are preparing engineers to help ensure a more sustainable future for our world.     

Course in Professional Practice Issues

The Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) and practitioners recognize professional practice issues as important in undergraduate civil engineering education. This paper describes a creative approach for incorporating professional practice issues into the civil engineering curriculum through a course entitled “Civil Engineering Practice.” This course has the following advantages: (1) It encourages active learning via activities as opposed to a traditional seminar; (2) forms long-term teaching partnerships with engineering professionals; (3) offers a venue where important yet distinct topics can be presented systematically; (4) provides the local engineering community with the opportunity to share its accomplishments and to further continuing education credits; (5) reinforces the professional practice elements of the capstone design project; and (6) supplies structured time where students can interact with potential employers and vice-versa. The course feedback from students, faculty, engineering professionals, and ABET evaluators has been overwhelmingly positive.     

Constructing Relationally Integrated Teams

Worldwide initiatives to improve construction industry performance converge on the common need for more effective teamworking. This is increasingly critical in the context of complex multiparticipant construction projects. Clashes of organizational, operational, national, and/or professional cultures point to the need for “relational integration” as a prerequisite for such synergistic teamworking. This paper draws on recent approaches to promoting trust and cooperation through (1) basic teambuilding techniques in general and (2) partnering and alliancing in construction projects. It then focuses on analyzing the views of Singapore-based contractors as derived from a survey to elicit the hypothesized 28 factors facilitating relationally integrated teambuilding, and 31 factors deterring such integration in construction project teams. On the whole: (1) 27 of the 28 factors facilitating integrated project team, and 26 of the 31 factors deterring integrated project team, are significant; (2) these two sets of factors could be represented by four and five “broad factors,” respectively; and (3) except in a few cases, respondents from large and medium companies, as well as with and without experience in RC, have similar perceptions of the importance levels of different factors. These two sets of critical factors, as identified in this paper, complement two other previously isolated sets of factors that facilitate or deter a “relational contracting” culture. Taken together, they feed into a consolidated strategy for releasing the latent energies and potential synergies that should yield the much higher construction project performance levels that have been called for worldwide.     

Invisible expressions evoke core impressions.

Participants viewed “hybrid” faces that showed a facial expression (anger, fear, happiness, or sadness) only in the lowest spatial frequency (1–6 cycles/image), which was blended with the same face's neutral expression in the rest of the bandwidth (7–128 cycles/image). Participants rated the portrayed persons (compared to neutral images) as “friendly” when the lowest spatial frequencies showed a positive expression and “unfriendly” when the lowest spatial frequencies showed negative expressions. In contrast, the same hybrid images were explicitly judged as neutral and their “hidden” emotional expressions could not be explicitly recognized, as also confirmed by d′ sensitivity measures. Finally, one patient (SS) who had the left anterior temporal lobe surgically resected (including the amygdala), failed to show the above described unconscious effects on friendliness judgments when viewing “afraid” and “sad” hybrid faces. We conclude that the lowest spatial frequencies of facial expressions can evoke “core” emotions without knowledge or awareness of a specific emotion but these core emotions can convey a clear “impression” of a person's character. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

On the ambiguity of concept use in psychology: Is the concept “concept” a useful concept?

We provide a historical and philosophical review of the main theories of concepts that implicitly or explicitly ground the various senses of the concept “concept” in psychology and related sciences, highlighting their respective strengths and limitations. We then consider these theories in terms of their ontology (i.e., their view of the nature/meaning of “concept”) and epistemology (i.e., their view of how concepts are acquired by individuals). This is followed by a brief summary of more current treatments and conceptualizations of concepts within psychology that seem linked, at least to some extent, by a general “received view” of sorts, according to which concepts are in some way “in the head.” We contrast this received view with a linguistic construal of concepts, according to which concepts are inextricably bound up with the terms in which they are expressed. We conclude with a consideration of the implications of the foregoing for concept research in psychology by conducting an ordinary language analysis of the concept “concept.” (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

American psychology's struggles with its curriculum: Should a thousand flowers bloom?

Although discussions of a core curriculum in doctoral training in psychology can be heard in contemporary psychology, there is no such common core, nor has one ever existed in American psychology's history. Advocates of a core curriculum argue that it ensures breadth of training, an outcome made even more important by growing specialization in psychology, and that it provides psychologists with a needed common identity as members of a recognized professional discipline. Opponents argue that a core curriculum places unwanted constraints on a program of study, prohibiting the kind of diversity needed to keep abreast of changes in psychology and related fields of study. The author reviews the history of this struggle within American psychology and discusses its implications for the science and practice of psychology. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Handbook of Indian psychology.

Reviews the book, Handbook of Indian psychology, edited by K. Ramakrishna Rao, Anand C. Paranjpe, and Ajit K. Dalal (see record 2008-09634-000). The importance and development of indigenous perspectives in psychology are well-documented in recent years, and many volumes have appeared that focus on specific cultural regions. The present volume is a welcome addition to this line of work, particularly as it is just the inaugural volume in a series entitled the “Indian Psychology Book Project.” After an introductory chapter, the volume is organised into three general parts devoted to “Systems and Schools,” “Topics and Themes,” and “Applications and Implications”. The first part is largely concerned with broad cultural and theological influences on Indian psychology. The second part includes topics that are typical of western psychological approaches, including motivation, personality, cognition, emotion and consciousness, all cast within an Indian cultural perspective. In the third part, authors seek to apply specific knowledge from these domains of Indian psychology to areas of practise such as meditation and health, and organisational effectiveness. This volume presents an exceedingly rich set of materials. Those interested in comprehending human beings in all their diversity should be prepared to spend hours with this book. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)