Student Number : 9906703K - MA research report - School of Psychology - Faculty of Humanities / Higher education and more specifically access to higher education has been a critical issue in the post-apartheid South Africa. With the aim of increasing access to higher education in order to achieve equity and redress, more students have been entering the higher education sector (73% of students are black and more than 50% are women) and a participation rate of 18% has been achieved. However, graduation rates remain low and attrition rates high, therefore the concepts of access and academic success need to be seen in the same light (Badsha, 2004). The aim of the present study is to look at a cognitive predictor of academic success, that is, the PTEEP academic literacy test. The purpose is to measure the validity of the PTEEP language proficiency test, as a predictor of academic literacy, on the University of Witwatersrand Humanity students’ academic success. The research approach for the study may be described as exploratorydescriptive in nature and was conducted within a quantitative framework. The participants comprised of 63 students from the 2004 cohort of students that gained admission to the university by means of the alternative selection procedure utilized by the Wits Faculty of Humanities. Descriptive and inferential statistics are employed to summarise and report the sample data in a meaningful way. The analysis of the present research focused on the PTEEP test, the specific PTEEP clusters, and academic success ratings in conjunction with variables such as gender and specific degrees within the Faculty of Humanities. The major findings of the present study indicate that there is no significant relationship between the PTEEP academic literacy test and academic success, and furthermore the PTEEP academic literacy test does not appear to be a good predictor of academic performance. These results are inconsistent with a large body of research indicating the predictive validity of the PTEEP test. However, the results do suggest that ‘Genre’, a subtest of the PTEEP test, demonstrates a strong relationship with academic success and is a significant predictor of academic success in this study. The results indicate the further exploration into cognitive developmental theory and the role it may play in developing admissions tests. Future research also needs to include other personal and situational variables over a longer period of time that could influence cognitive development and academic success.

Most developmental theories propose reasons for behavior and changes in behavior due to influences from genetic and environmental factors. A behavioral change that occurs during development, from infancy to adulthood, is the increasing number of choices that are made. The purpose of this study was to investigate developmental theory as it relates to adolescent choice (influences, interactions, activity, preference, and acceptance) in the environment most readily controlled by adolescents, their bedrooms. Two hundred thirty-four eighth- and ninth-grade students responded to the Adolescent Development and Environments Research Survey. The survey assessed gender, grade, pubertal status, negative/positive passive and active genotype-environment effects, height and weight, and bedroom design and decoration influence, preference, activity, and acceptance (dislike-like). Results confirmed relations among gender and bedroom design preferences and activity. Girls' bedrooms contained a greater variety of items than did boys' bedrooms. Additionally, girls were overall more active in procuring items for their bedrooms than were boys. Grade differences (within gender) were identified for boys and girls for preferences, but not activity. Regarding pubertal status, Lo and Hi pubertal status girls differed in preferences, and the use of their own money to procure bedroom items. Lo and Hi pubertal status boys differed both in preferences and in bedroom location change. Perceived influences on adolescent bedroom design were associated with preferences for related items (e.g., the "Classes at school" influence category correlated positively with "Bookcase"). Regarding bedroom design acceptance, adolescents were less likely to like heir bedroom designs if they had ignored their parents' opinions about their bedroom design and instead furnished their bedrooms the way they wanted to. Girls who had no masculine items in their bedrooms were likely to have parents who gave the final word about bedroom design. Adolescents' friends influenced their frequency of bedroom design. With regard to obtaining bedroom items, girls and boys differed in the number and type of influences they reported. Previous studies of gender, age (grade), and pubertal status support these findings. Further, these findings support developmental theory suppositions as related to biosocial influences, negative/positive passive geneenvironment effects, and opportunity structures.

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It has been long known that groups of adults learn and enact their learning in certain ways; what is little known is how groups learn and how they develop in cognitive complexity. This dissertation proposes a theory of group cognitive development by arguing that intentional adult groups are complex and dynamic, and that they have the potential to evolve over time. Groups are complex in that they are made up of individuals within different orders of consciousness (Kegan), and they are dynamic in that different orders of consciousness interact and conflict (Lonergan) during the formation and enactment of group vision, values, and procedures. Dynamic complexity theory of group development as it is referred to in this study is grounded in Robert Kegan’s constructive developmental theory and in Bernard Lonergan’s transcendental method. While both Kegan and Lonergan attend to the growth of individuals, their theories are adapted to groups in order to understand the cognitive complexity of groups, intragroup and intergroup conflict, and the mental complexity of leader curriculum. This theory is applied to two case studies, one from antiquity in the case of the first century Corinthian community engaged in conflict with its founder, St. Paul, and in one contemporary study of American Catholic parishioners engaged in contentious dialogue with diocesan leaders from 1994 to 2004. The parish groups experienced a series of dialogues during a ten year period over the issues of parish restructuring and the priest sexual abuse crisis yielding cumulative and progressive changes in perspective-taking, responsibility-taking, and in group capacity to respond to and engage local and institutional authority figures. Group development is observed against a pedagogical backdrop that represents a mismatch between group complexity and leader expectations. In Corinth, Paul’s curriculum was significantly beyond the mental capacity of the community. In the case of Catholic parishioners the curriculum of diocesan leaders was beneath the mental capacities of most of the groups studied. It is proposed that individuals sharing the same order of consciousness, understood as cognitive constituencies, are in a dynamic relationship with other cognitive constituencies in the group that interact within an object-subject dialectic and an agency-communion dialectic. The first describes and explains the evolving cognitive complexity of group knowing, how the group does its knowing, and what it knows when it is doing it (the epistemologies of the group). This dialectic has implications for how intentional groups might be the critical factor for understanding individual growth. The second dialectic describes and explains the changing relationship between group agency, which is enacted either instrumentally or ideologically; and group communion, which is enacted ideationally. The agency-communion dialectic is held in an unstable balance in the knowing, identity, and mission of groups. With implications for the fields of adult education and learning organizations, dynamic complexity theory of group development notes predictable stages of group evolution as each cognitive constituency evolves, and notes the significance of internal and external conflict for exposing the presence of different ways of knowing and for challenging the group toward cognitive growth. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2008. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Religious Education and Pastoral Ministry.

Child and youth care workers in residential care provide support and intervention to young people who are experiencing difficulties in their lives. Caring for these young people can be complex and demanding and many child and youth care practitioners struggle to meet the challenges associated with their roles. Practice problems include volatile and punitive environments, inability of practitioners to safely manage young people’s threatening and aggressive behaviours, and staff turnover and burnout. These problems are often attributed to job stress, personal characteristics of practitioners, and lack of education, training, and professional development. To reconceptualise the aforementioned practice problems, Robert Kegan’s (1982) constructive-developmental theory was used as a theoretical framework to explore the experiences of child and youth care workers in residential care. The research was guided by 2 main questions: 1. How do different meaning-making systems influence how practitioners cope with and experience the demands of the job? 2. What role does the organizational environment play, if any, in mediating or exacerbating the demands of the job for practitioners with different meaning-making systems? An exploratory study was conducted using a mixed methods design. The study was conducted in two stages. First, 99 participants completed the Professional Quality of Life Scale (ProQOL), Work Environment Scale (WES), and Leadership Development Profile (LDP). Linear regression was conducted to explore the relationships between the ProQOL, LDP, and WES and most results were not significant. From the initial pool, 18 participants were selected for in-depth, qualitative interviews to assess their constructive-developmental orders – the ways in which they make meaning - and explore their experiences in residential care in the areas of job satisfaction and success, challenge, and coping with the demands of the job. The ways in which participants at different constructive-developmental orders experience and cope with the challenges of their jobs are described and themes are identified. There was internal coherence among participants of the same epistemological order and across organizations. This dissertation examines implications of the findings for child and youth care practice, education, training, supervision, research, and organizational management in residential care. / Graduate

<p>This investigation is a comparative study of the artistic development research of Rhoda Kellogg and the research of Helga Eng, Henry Schaefer-Simmern, and Viktor Lowenfeld. The intent of this investigation is to compare Kellogg’s children’s artistic development research to other theorists of the period to discover similarities and differences in her work, validating its significance. The criteria of the selection of the theorists limit the investigation to the research of children’s artistic development stage theories in the mid-twentieth century. The results of this investigation found that Kellogg’s children’s artistic development research consisted of far more categorizations of marks in the scribble and pre-schema stages than Eng, Schaefer-Simmern, and Lowenfeld’s research. The study also expands on the significance of Kellogg’s children’s artistic development research in the field of art education and the context in which Kellogg undertook her research. This investigation also brought attention to and documented Kellogg’s research more extensively than previous studies.</p>

This theoretical thesis is focused on mapping and comparing the leading psychological transpersonal approaches to the conception of development of consciousness of an individual. This research is exploring the theory of Ken Wilber, Michael Washburn and Stanislav Grof also paying attention to the main disagreement among them regarding the confusion of prepersonal and transpersonal spheres of consciousness. This disagreement is further elaborated in an effort to find a conclusion and to seek for an integrative theory. The theories are compared with regard to the findings about psychedelic experience. The psychedelic experience is psychologically elaborated with emphasis on the current scientific knowledge in the field and their embedding in the context of the developmental theories of consciousness taking the effort of unravelling the pre/trans fallacy and the clinical implications into account. KEYWORDS Developmental theory, consciousness, transpersonal, psychedelics, pre/trans fallacy

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This thesis examines data and theory about how the system of law (SL) operates and evolves: it contrasts data from social workers and attorneys working in the juvenile dependency court with theories about how individuals and social systems evolve. The analysis is based on research conducted in San Diego and revolves around a theory about human development, or the "individual as a system" (HD), and a theory about social systems, such as the autopoietic theory of law and its self-reproducing system (LA). It is suggested that together, the theories of HD+LA help to examine how professionals and law operate and evolve in the legal system. Overall, the thesis rejects the autopoietic systems theory that law reproduces itself, by itself. Instead, analysis in this study supports the finding that law is defined and operates through a dialectic of the individual and the social (or the organic and the mechanistic respectively) such that each gives rise to the other. On the basis of this system connection, aspects from systems theory about legal autopoiesis are integrated into concepts from constructive-developmental theory (HDLA), thus providing a new framework through which to examine how law and its system functions. The new framework is built around an equation that emerged some time after data analysis and theoretical development: SL&equals;HDLA+DSA . The equation states that: The evolution of the system of law involves processes of human development and to some but a much lesser degree, the autopoietic nature of law. The extent of this evolution is best determined by analyzing data from a court setting. The dialectical relationship between individual and social influences in the evolution of law is facilitated by the accumulation of social action � such as activity from media and advocacy groups � and the individual meaning that professionals make about this action, which in turn has an influence on the formal and informal operations that they perform when operating law. The nature of these interacting dynamics will be shown through two interconnected tools of analysis: one is a typology of individual, professional and system self-concepts; the typology helps to show how a cycle of system change (human development giving rise to legal change and vice versa) occurs in the court; the other is the operative structure (or culture) of systems for law and social work in child abuse cases � which unite in court operations. These two interconnected tools help to show how the court operates and how social action (SA) for change contributes to professional and system change in the evolution of law.