Assignment: Evolutionary Or Biological Personality

Assignment: Evolutionary Or Biological Personality

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Write a 1,000- to 1,250-word informational article for a newspaper in which you do the following:

• Describe the differences between dispositional and evolutionary or biological personality theories.
• Discuss the strengths and limitations of dispositional and evolutionary or biological personality theories as they apply to behavior.
• Discuss the Big Five personality test and how it is used to study personality.

Include a minimum of two to three sources.

Format your article consistent with APA guidelines.

In the field of psychology, Froese et al. (1998) noted that “this mismatch between expectation and performance may arise from instructional deficiencies” (p. 103). They argued that instructors may make faulty assumptions about students’ ability to transfer critical thinking skills learned in other facets of their graduate programs to the writing of comprehensive literature reviews. Because of these assumptions, the essential writing skills necessary to engage in cognitively complex writing assignments are not explicitly taught to graduate students. These writing skills both allow students’ current level of cognitive complexity to be expressed and, in turn, force students to higher levels of complexity in their thinking and writing (Klein, 1999). Boice (1982) and Nodine (1990) suggested that faculty must make the effort to teach these writing skills to students, but both lamented the absence of relevant models to guide this instruction.

In the field of counselor education, there also is a lack of information on how to teach critical writing skills to graduate students. Articles related to writing literature reviews explain the process of publishing (e.g., Forman, 1988), suggest methods for improving publication success (e.g., Gladding, 1989; McGowan, 1996; Smaby & Crews, 1998), and give tips on publishing in particular journals (e.g., Brown, 1989; Hazler, 1992). No article could be located, however, that provides a model to teach students how to engage in the higher order thinking and writing skills necessary to write advanced quality literature reviews.

There is, however, a framework available to guide counselor educators in their efforts to help graduate students write more cognitively complex literature reviews. The Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, Handbook I: Cognitive Domain (Bloom, Engelhart, Furst, Hill, & Krathwohl, 1956), more commonly referred to as Bloom’s Taxonomy, is a specification of six hierarchically ordered levels of instructional outcomes that are intended to move students toward higher levels of cognitive complexity. Bloom’s Taxonomy could be a useful learning schema if applied to writing graduate-level papers in counselor education.