This thesis examines the development of reflective skills. Reflection has been recognised as a prime mode of creating knowledge for project managers. Reflection literature indicates that reflective skills do not develop naturally; guidance, encouragement and facilitation is usually required for managers to reach their highest learning potential. Among the tools suggested to aid this development are written project journals. While there has been research on some aspects of journals, there was little found on the design of reflective journals relevant to developing project management reflection skills. This study has examined the effect or influence of various designs of reflective journals on different facets of reflective learning. The research question was: ????Are there facets of reflection that can be influenced by journal design????? Evidence for the study was first gathered through literature then from journal content and interviews. Literature on reflective learning revealed the facets relevant to the study: definition of reflection, consequences, emotions, temporal factors and individual and organisational culture. Issues identified in journal literature that needed to be applied to the study of reflection development included the journal audience, assessment and format. Participants in the study were final year undergraduates and Masters students who worked on industry based projects over several months. They were requested to keep journals for the duration of the projects, to submit them for examination and then asked to offer feedback on the various journal designs on completion of the projects. The research was conducted over four years, through seven projects, with thirty students taking part. The journal design went through six modifications. The primary findings from the study were: the majority of participants followed the predicted development hierarchy of reflective development; development of reflective skills is dependent on individual and organisational culture; audience does have an impact on reporting of and reflection on concerns; and journal design can facilitate development of some levels of reflection but has no influence on the development of critical reflection. / Masters by research thesis

One of the most interesting developments in recent psychological theorising has been a growing appreciation of the need for a viable theory of mental causation. Hitherto, the prospects for reconciling what seems to be the uniquely rational character of human thought and action with the non-rational mechanistic workings of the natural world have appeared to be limited or even illusory, and the pursuit of reconciliation of this sort has therefore formerly been dismissed as being either impossible of completion or inappropriate for contemplation. Much of the scepticism concerning the role of causal processes in human thought and action was dispelled, however, by the philosopher Donald Davidson, who argues that not only is human action capable of being caused by the actor�s thoughts and desires, but that only when such action is so caused, can it be rational. Davidson�s proposal for the reconciliation of human rationality with causal necessitation is articulated in his theory of Anomalous Monism. According to this theory, there exists what may be termed an ontological-conceptual distinction between events themselves and the characters or properties that are attributed to events by human observers, and it is through recognition of this distinction that one discovers how mental events, that is, events that are amenable to description in the psychological vocabulary, are causally efficacious yet free from the constraints typically associated with the necessity and sufficiency of causal laws. Anomalous Monism, if it were workable, would therefore resolve the paradox according to which human mentality is at once integrated in, and yet unconstrained by, the mechanistic natural world, by demonstrating the compatibility of the facts of causation with the intuitions of folk psychology. However, close examination of Anomalous Monism reveals it to rely on logically flawed anti-realist principles concerning the characters of events, properties and causation. It follows from this that the theory itself must be rejected, but the task that it was devised to undertake, the formulation of a viable theory of mental causation, need not be similarly discarded. Rather, what remains is the challenge of delineating an alternative theory, one that withstands logical scrutiny whilst addressing what is characteristic of human mental processes, and thereby what is characteristic of mental causation. The theory of Direct Realism that is derived from the broader philosophical realism of John Anderson provides the materials for meeting this challenge. According to Direct Realism, mental phenomena are relational situations obtaining between certain organisms (including humans) and their environments. As such, mental phenomena are included in the range of phenomena occurring in the natural world and they are therefore subject to all of its ways of working, including its deterministic mechanisms. The particular challenge that a Direct Realist theory of mental causation faces, that of demonstrating that relational situations can be causal, is revealed upon examination of the character of causation to be unproblematic. Furthermore, the seeming incompatibility between human rationality and natural necessitation is resolved when it is acknowledged that, rather than be an inherent feature of thought and action, logical structure is a characteristic of the natural environment that organisms are at times sensitive to, as revealed by its effects on the characters of their thoughts and actions. Far from being remote or illusory, the prospects for reconciling human mentality with the causal mechanisms of the natural world are discovered in the present thesis to be favourable when a realist approach to the characters of both mental events and causation is adopted.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Toronto, 2004. / Adviser: Janet W. Astington.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Toronto, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 148-156).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Canterbury, 2008. / Typescript (photocopy). Includes bibliographical references (leaves 86-93). Also available via the World Wide Web.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Carleton University, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 243-249). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Carleton University, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 184-193). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of St Andrews, February 2007.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--West Virginia University, 1999. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains vi, 61 p. Vita. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 37-45).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Edinburgh, 1999.