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In today's market-driven educational culture, universities are coming under increasing pressure to justify funding through the disclosure of measurable outcomes in education and research. One educational objective that receives particular attention is critical thinking, regarded as an essential skill in both academic and work environments. The assessment of critical thinking has become a significant enterprise, with a number of standardised tests available for both individuals and organisations. While these tests are based on well-known taxonomies of critical thinking, this paper argues that institutions should be wary of using them as a means to measure educational outcomes. First, they fail to take into account fundamentally contested issues within conceptions of critical thinking. They also have significant weaknesses in terms of validity and reliability. Finally, and most importantly, they provide only a limited assessment of critical thinking, failing to evaluate the skills exercised in real-life academic tasks. A more effective approach to critical thinking testing would be one implemented at a faculty level, with assessments carried out on coursework integral to the curricula of specific academic disciplines.

With a growing number of Asian students attending Western universities, the difficulties they seem to face in adapting to a new academic environment has provoked much discussion amongst educators, particularly with regard to the critical thinking (CT) skills. Many educators have claimed that, as a result of their cultural and educational backgrounds, Asian students lack the CT skills essential for academic tasks such as essay writing and debates. Other researchers, however, have argued this is due simply to the disadvantages of carrying out studies in a foreign language. In fact, there have been surprisingly few studies directly comparing Asian students' CT skills in their first compared to their second languages. Those that have been done have tended to employ standardised CT tests which, in their discrete, short-answer format, do not accurately reflect the tasks students carry out in university courses. In this study, therefore, two classes of Japanese university students, all with TOEFL scores high enough to enter Western universities, were asked to carry out an oral and written debate, one class in Japanese and the other in English. Evaluations of their performances by independent raters revealed stark differences between the two classes in their ability to construct and deconstruct arguments, find logical inconsistencies and express themselves clearly and persuasively.

This paper will examine how Japanese education policy was articulated discursively from 1996 to 2010 in the semi-annual speeches of prime ministers to the Diet. It will identify three distinct discourses within these policy statements: a progressive discourse emphasizing the rights of individuals; a neo-liberal discourse of social independence and multi-tracked schooling; and a moral conservative discourse of patriotism and social conformism. In the 1990s, progressive and neo-liberal discourses held sway. Discursively, they were centred on key phrases such as "kosei jushi" ("respect for individuality") and "sozosei" (creativity), which were employed in a strategically ambiguous way to satisfy both progressive and neo-liberal demands. In the 2000s, however, right-wing politicians began to push a moral conservative agenda, which emphasized not the rights of individuals but their subservience to the wider needs of society and state. With neo-liberalism backed by powerful business interests, policymakers had to find a way to reconcile these two conflicting viewpoints discursively. They did this by binding the concept of individuality to traditional notions of Japanese identity and national citizenship, creating a hybrid discourse that attempted to blur the fundamental difference in ideologies. (Contains 1 table.)

There is an ongoing debate over whether traditional Japanese business practices are converging towards those of Anglo-American societies. One aspect of business practice is the attitude toward the skills demanded of newly graduated recruits. Traditionally, Japanese managers were said to value communitarian attributes, such as cooperativeness and flexibility, to encourage socialisation into the firm's culture; however, in the last two decades business groups have been emphasising a new set of qualities, including creativity and problem solving, expressing these in a discourse of personal independence and autonomy. This study reports interviews conducted with Japanese managers concerning the attributes and skills they seek in new employees. It finds that, within the firms canvassed, managers still stressed the importance of communitarian values, often articulating attributes and skills in terms of their contribution to the overall harmony of the firm. The findings have potential implications for how we understand cultural change and continuity within Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Standardised tests, such as the California Critical Thinking Skills Test, are often employed to measure the critical thinking skills of students in higher education. While these tests do assess certain aspects of critical thinking, it is important to acknowledge their limitations. In the quest for scientific validity and objectivity, they rely on multiple choice and short answer formats that do not accurately reflect the kind of tasks students undertake at university. With the growing trend in education for measuring and comparing outcomes, we must be wary of relying on such tests to evaluate the crucial attribute of critical thinking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the dominant Japanese identity discourse of nihonjinron through Laclau and Mouffe's Discourse Theory. Arguing that nihonjinron has been undertheorized in Japanese studies, this article critically analyzes the processes by which nihonjinron achieves, maintains, and challenges social dominance. It conceives of nihonjinron as a social imaginary which constructs nodal points such as kokoro (heart or soul) and provides a totalizing identity for Japanese culture and society. In recent years, however, newly created nodal points, such as kosei (individuality) and kokusaika (internationalization), have emerged as alternatives to the hegemonic, discursively created identities of Japanese society. While Japan's elites attempt to limit the meanings of these signifiers in ways advantageous to themselves, they have not been able to prevent these signifiers from taking on new meanings from the field of discursivity. Detailed textual evidence shows how kosei and kokusaika have become “floating signifiers" for competing discourses, potentially putting the social imaginary of nihonjinron at risk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Molecular dynamics simulations are carried out to systematically address the effects of composition and pressure on melts along the MgO–SiO2 join and elucidate the role of structural modifier content on silicate melt properties. The MgO–SiO2 system shows non-ideal mixing with a negative excess volume of mixing at low pressures, but the mixing becomes closer to ideal at higher pressures. At atmospheric pressure, the viscosities and diffusivities vary by more than 3 orders of magnitude as the composition is varied along this join, with the low SiO2 melts characterized by lower viscosities and higher diffusivities; these results are in quantitative agreement with experimental results for the dependence of viscosity and diffusivity on structural modifier content in a wide range of silicate systems. The transport properties of melts in this system converge at higher pressures; at pressures greater than ∼15GPa the viscosity and diffusivities vary by less than an order of magnitude across the entire range of compositions. The relevance of equations that relate the viscosity and diffusivity is also addressed. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The article presents an advice column on posting copy of a medical paper on a Web site. Lori Keys Pender, a freelance medical writer specializing in oncology recommends reviewing all old contracts very carefully before proceeding with posting any samples that do not already include an acknowledgment of work in the text. Medical writer Cindy W. Hamilton suggests making sure to obtain permission from appropriate people before posting copy on a Web site. Maggie Castrey, a freelance healthcare writer and consultant and David Rear, founder and president of Advanced Clinical Concepts also offered some suggestions.