There are two parts to this present article. First, I consider the applied problem of assessing changes in a congregation—how often to assess, why assess, what changes are looked for, what interventions are assessed, why look to the components of interventions, and how to avoid problems interpreting your data. Brief assessments are mandatory. Pastors and lay leaders can make simple but sound assessments of their spiritual formation programs using item response theory, goal attainment scales, single items, parceling single items, or (...) narrative responses as five alternatives. I describe dangers in interpreting the findings such as not knowing the base rate of change and mistaking the assessment for the mission. In the second part of the article, I briefly describe a program labeled a deep dive into humility. I summarize the assessments that were done, which gives a practical example of the technical recommendations I made earlier in the article. (shrink)

In this article, we contribute to a conversation in global Christianity. Majority World pastors want access to training so they can more effectively care for their communities. But how? In this article, we create a context for spiritual formation rooted in virtue theory. We offer a humility-based, cross-cultural, relationally oriented model for training indigenous leaders while they are rooted within their locales, communities, and ministry contexts. We highlight a method that we believe to be culturally, educationally, and psychologically hearty. We (...) explore the non-formal training model and curriculum of Training Leaders International as a test case. TLI provides a structured program of training in spiritual growth and hermeneutical and communication skills to Christian leaders in the Majority World within their indigenous contexts. But it develops and delivers this training in a manner that causes two key factors to rise to prominence that are widely applicable in the cross-cultural development of Christian leaders: cultural humility and Christian-adapted virtue development, both relationally oriented. This article is meant to inspire and enable other ministries. (shrink)

The US neutrino community gathered at the Workshop on the Intermediate Neutrino Program at Brookhaven National Laboratory February 4-6, 2015 to explore opportunities in neutrino physics over the next five to ten years. Scientists from particle, astroparticle and nuclear physics participated in the workshop. The workshop examined promising opportunities for neutrino physics in the intermediate term, including possible new small to mid-scale experiments, US contributions to large experiments, upgrades to existing experiments, R&D plans and theory. The workshop was organized into (...) two sets of parallel working group sessions, divided by physics topics and technology. Physics working groups covered topics on Sterile Neutrinos, Neutrino Mixing, Neutrino Interactions, Neutrino Properties and Astrophysical Neutrinos. Technology sessions were organized into Theory, Short-Baseline Accelerator Neutrinos, Reactor Neutrinos, Detector R&D and Source, Cyclotron and Meson Decay at Rest sessions.This report summarizes discussion and conclusions from the workshop. (shrink)

Research has shown that people sometimes report self-perceived growth as a result of dealing with a potentially traumatic event, but relatively few methodologically rigorous studies have examined whether perceived posttraumatic growth is associated with improved subsequent well-being across a wide range of outcomes. In this three-wave longitudinal study of Colombian emerging adults, we examined the associations of perceived posttraumatic growth with 17 well-being outcomes across domains of psychological well-being, psychological distress, social well-being, physical well-being, and character strengths. Using an outcome-wide (...) analytic design that adjusted for a range of covariates assessed in Wave 1, we found that overall perceived posttraumatic growth assessed in Wave 2 was robustly associated with improvements in one or more facet of each well-being domain assessed approximately six months later in Wave 3. Our findings suggest that perceived posttraumatic growth may contribute to individual well-being over the longer-term. (shrink)

Liberal political theory is widely believed to be an inadequate source of civic commitment and thus of civic education primarily because of its commitment to what is perceived as a pervasive individualism. In this paper, I explore the possibility that John Rawls’s later political philosophy may provide a response to this belief. I first articulate a conception of liberal politics derived from Rawls’s idea of reflective equilibrium that generates an overlapping consensus about political principles among those who hold a wide (...) variety of cultural and personal conceptions of the good. Next I develop the aims for civic education in a society that employs such a politics. Then I suggest the elements of the public school curriculum appropriate for such a civic education, including a robust multicultural education, intellectual reflection on the society’s history, and philosophical training that enables children to understand the events and policies of their nation as following from general political principles. I also consider the kinds of classroom practice that seem necessary to provide the motivation to engage in the process of the emergence of an overlapping consensus, including opportunities to develop and to reflect on the principles that may be included in the current consensus and to understand the way in which those principles relate to children’s developing conceptions of the good. Finally, I compare this conception of civic education to those of other liberal theorists. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to consider whether standards-based school reform is an acceptable strategy for achieving a politically legitimate school system according to a principle of personal liberty. First, it briefly describes the purpose and implementation of standards-based school reform in the U.S. It then considers the ramifications of the principle of personal liberty for the conduct of public schooling, arguing that it requires children’s access to and appreciation of a variety of liberty-consistent cultures in their society coupled (...) with the development of children’s ability to think critically about those cultures and their meaning as possibilities for their own lives. Third, it considers whether some standards for public education might be consistent with this purpose of education and finds that certain outcome and process standards may be appropriate. Finally, it considers whether these kinds of standards are included in standards-based reform as it is currently practiced or proposed in the U.S. and concludes that they are not. (shrink)

Systemic education reform calls for state imposition of uniform standards for student performance, the curriculum, and student opportunities to learn that curriculum, coupled with the alignment of basic state accountability, teacher education, and financing policies and expanded school decision-making authority. Proponents argue that systemic reform will have the effect of enhancing overall economic growth and equalizing opportunities for the most disadvantaged. Analysis of the first claim suggests that the inherent tension between employment-oriented outcome standards and discipline-oriented curriculum frameworks and the (...) uniform application of such standards to all schools may undermine economic growth. Moreover, systemic reform appears more likely to transform current social inequalities than to eliminate them. (shrink)

Life history theory aims to explain the relationship between life events, recognizing that the fertility and growth schedules of organisms are dependent on environmental conditions and an organism’s ability to extract resources from its environment. Using models from life history theory, we predict life expectancy to be positively correlated with educational investments and negatively correlated with adolescent reproduction and total fertility rates. Analyses of UN data from 193 countries support these predictions and demonstrate that, although variation is evident across world (...) regions, strong interactions exist among life expectancy, reproductive investments, and educational attainment, and these relationships occur independently of economic pressures and disease burdens. The interactions are strongest, however, in countries with a life expectancy of ≥60 years as these countries tend to have stable economies and a limited HIV/AIDS burden. These findings suggest that policies aimed at influencing education and reproductive decisions should consider environmental characteristics that drive people’s expectations about their longevity. (shrink)

The aims of the present study were to analyse people’s natural ability to discriminate between true and false statements provided by people with intellectual disability (IQTRUE = 62.00, SD = 10.07; IQFALSE = 58.41, SD = 8.42), and the differentiating characteristics of such people’s statements using criteria-based content analysis (CBCA). Thirty-three people assessed 16 true statements and 13 false statements using their normal abilities. Two other evaluators trained in CBCA evaluated the same statements. The natural evaluators differentiated between true and (...) false statements with somewhat above-chance accuracy, even though error rate was high (38.19%). That lay participants could not effectively discriminate between false and true statements demonstrates that such assessments cannot be considered useful in a forensic context. The CBCA technique did discriminate at a better level than intuitive judgements. However, of the 19 criteria, only one significantly discriminated. More procedures specifically adapted to the abilities of people with intellectual disabilities are thus required. The presence of structured production, quantity of details, characteristics details and unexpected complications increased the probability that a statement would be considered true by non-expert evaluators. The classification made by the non-expert evaluators was independent of the participants’ IQ. A big data analysis is performed in search for better classification quality. (shrink)

A key source of support for the view that challenging people’s beliefs about free will may undermine moral behavior is two classic studies by Vohs and Schooler (2008). These authors reported that exposure to certain prompts suggesting that free will is an illusion increased cheating behavior. In the present paper, we report several attempts to replicate this influential and widely cited work. Over a series of five studies (sample sizes of N = 162, N = 283, N = 268, N (...) = 804, N = 982) (four preregistered) we tested the relationship between (1) anti-free-will prompts and free will beliefs and (2) free will beliefs and immoral behavior. Our primary task was to closely replicate the findings from Vohs and Schooler (2008) using the same or highly similar manipulations and measurements as the ones used in their original studies. Our efforts were largely unsuccessful. We suggest that manipulating free will beliefs in a robust way is more difficult than has been implied by prior work, and that the proposed link with immoral behavior may not be as consistent as previous work suggests. (shrink)

Seeking consent for genetic and genomic research can be challenging, particularly in populations with low literacy levels, and in emergency situations. All of these factors were relevant to the MalariaGEN study of genetic factors influencing immune responses to malaria in northern rural Ghana. This study sought to identify issues arising in practice during the enrolment of paediatric cases with severe malaria and matched healthy controls into the MalariaGEN study.