Implications of Confucian learning on nurse education in the UK: a discussion

This paper explores and discusses the increasing presence of international recruitment in higher education in the UK with a particular focus on nurse education and the implications of this growth in student population with regards to teaching and learning. It draws attention to the noted differences in learning styles of Confucian learners from the East to that of Socratic learners in the West. Addressing these two dimensions and cultural differences in learning for international students is important if educators are to fully understand the student learning behaviours. Owing to a lack of information regarding these learning behaviours in the nursing domain, comparisons have been drawn from other disciplines. Recurrent themes are presented and analysed in terms of the educational paradigm and their possible influence on the educational interaction is postulated. From this analysis it is apparent that although quite disparate, both learning behaviours could benefit from each other's intellectual tradition. Emic differences between learning styles have been highlighted in this paper, it would in future be useful to identify etic commonalities within learning groups and use those as a foundation for further research, so that the full potential of confusion learners can be achieved within a Westernised academic arena.

The weirdest people in the world?

Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world's top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers – often implicitly – assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these “standard subjects” are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species – frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior – hence, there are no obviousa priorigrounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions ofhumannature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. We close by proposing ways to structurally re-organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges.