Renowned international experts in higher education financing have argued that, owing to large government deficits, tertiary education will not be able to open up and meet growing demand unless cost-sharing principles and efficient student financial aid programmes are introduced. Opponents of cost-sharing in higher education object that introducing tuition fees will raise inequality in access to higher education. Drawing on OECD data, and focusing on college expectations, the authors argue that the effects of ability, gender, and socio-economic background on college expectations are primarily shaped by the characteristics of secondary education systems, such as the degree of stratification and vocational specificity of secondary schools, while the principal characteristics of the tertiary education system, such as enrolment rates and the model of financing, play a much less important role. The results clearly show that, after controlling for the effects of secondary school system characteristics, cost-sharing, as such or by degree, does not affect the formation of college expectations by ability, gender, and socio-economic background as much as the selectivity of the secondary school system does.
The authors examined the assumption that individual differences in Need For (cognitive) Closure (NFC) and the Ability to Achieve (cognitive) Closure (AAC) are related to information-processing style in threatening situations. Analysis showed that NFC was related to monitoring style and high level in NFCS subscale Discomfort with ambiguity was associated with information-seeking behaviour. AAC was associated neither with informational behaviour nor with cognitive coping style. The monitoring/blunting concept seems to be promising especially in the context of research of real-life threatening situations.
The goal of this paper is to show that disagreement between compatibilists and in-compatibilists about compatibility of free will with determinism is merely verbal, since although one side of the dispute claims that free will is compatible with determinism, whereas the other side denies it, they in fact ascribe to the expression „free will“ a different meaning. One can thus accept both the compatibilist thesis as well as the in-compatibilist thesis, as these two do not constitute a contradictory pair. My method consists in analysing the meaning of the phrase being an ability to do other-wise as a property of abilities and the meaning of the phrase having an ability to do otherwise as a property of agents. The outcome of conducted analysis enables me to make an unbiased comparison of necessary conditions which compatibilists and in-compatibilists expect to hold if agents are to have the ability to do otherwise. It is shown, as expected, that these conditions are not the same.
One of the main questions in ability-based emotional intelligence tests is the problem of the correct answer. 197 high school students answered on Vocabulary Emotions Test (VET, Taksic, Harambasic, Velemir, 2004), in company with ten experts in the field. The authors compared different methods of determining the correct answer, with particular regard to expert and consensus scoring methods. The aim of the study was to explore which of the different methods of calculating the correct answer (proportion, mode, lenient mode, distance and adjusted distance) can be used as best estimation of the correct answer taken from a Croatian dictionary. The results showed that experts' scoring methods were more closely connected to the correct answer than were consensus scoring methods according to the rest of the group.
The density of talent (creativity) in an ethnic group or population is calculated in various ways by scholars. Some of them estimate it to be 0.025% or 1-2-3-4-5-6-8-8.3% of the total population; others put it as high as 10-15-16-20-30-50%. All this means that research about creativity has not yet reached a consensus. According to the author, the density of creative persons in a given population does not reveal the assumed 'normal distribution' accepted by most scholars. The distribution of talent pursues a totally different distributional pattern, one discovered by Pareto, an asymmetric, logarithmic (or lognormal) distribution known today as the 'Zipf-Pareto principle' (or Zipf-law). It means that the ratio of potentially talented persons is constantly constituted by the square root, = 1/10th of the total population. Assuming that the number of the population or ethnic group is 100%, its 10%, i.e. mathematically speaking the square root or 'geometrical average' will therefore be the ratio of talented persons. In addition to this 10 per cent, there exists an even smaller group of 'super-creative' persons, equalling the square root of this former 10% group (3.16%). The existence of this smaller group is backed up by population genetics. In any case, in European societies authentic culture is acquired in an intelligent way by 10% of the total population, while the relevant information when compared to total information consists in the square root of that per cent. Moreover the symmetrical functioning of both cerebral hemispheres, a necessary and inevitable condition for the manifestation of talent, is present only on 10% of a given population. In addition the clear dominance of the right cerebral hemisphere (the centre of creativity, intuition, vision and emotional life) is also present in 10-12% of a given population.
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