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Successful Intelligence

Successful Intelligence-I

We all know that the definition of success differs from person to person. Most of the times success is associated with the academic grades. According to the theorist  Dr. Robert Sternberg success comprises of the three important ingredients, ability to be analytical,  creative and practical. He names these as Analytical Intelligence, Creative Intelligence and Practical Intelligence. 

Analytical Intelligence: Involves a process of analyzing, evaluating, judging, comparing or contrasting to find a solution for a problem. 

Creative Intelligence: Involves thinking identically, imagining out of the box to solve problems. It is going beyond the limits of analytical abilities.

Practical Intelligence : It is the commons sense used in different social situations.

The Integrated use of these three types of intelligence can bring success in life. 

Some of the characteristics of successfully intelligent people.

1. Successfully intelligent people are self-efficacious.
2. Delivers performance that distinguish them from ordinary people.
3. Strengthen their intellectual abilities and compensate or correct their weaknesses.
4. They are flexible in adapting to situations and roles they need to play.
5. Define problems correctly.
6. Carefully formulate strategies to solve problems.
7. Buy low and sell high.

References:

1.  http://www.mycollegesuccessstory.com/academic-success-tools/successful-intelligence.html 
2. Sternberg, R. J. (2000). Succesful Intelligence: how practical and creative intelligence determine success in life. Magna Publishing CO.  
3. Sternberg, R. J. (2002). Raising the Achievement of All Students: Teaching for Successful Intelligence, Educational Psychology. 14(4), 383–393.
4. Sternberg, R. J. (2006). The Rainbow Project: Enhancing the SAT through assessments of analytical, practical, and creative skills. Intelligence. 34, 321–350.
5. Sternberg, R. J., & Grigorenko, E. L. (2000). Teaching for successful intelligence: To increase student learning and achievement. Arlington Heights, IL: Skylight Professional Development.

 

Book Review Research Methodology by C. R. Kothari and Gaurav Garg (2016)

Book Review  

Research Methodology by C. R. Kothari and Gaurav Garg (2016)

“Research Methodology- Methods and Techniques”, authored by C. R. Kothari and Gaurav Garg is published by the New Age International Publishers. The book has 19 main chapters. Each chapter is discussed in detail, which gives complete information to readers.

            The first chapter gives the introduction to research methodology. It covers the topics meaning, objectives, significance and types of research, research approaches, research process, criteria of good research, problems faced by researchers in India. Research process is been represented with a flow chart which helps the reader to understand the complex process in a simpler way. Research methods versus methodology and research and scientific method are clearly and neatly explained in this chapter. The second chapter concentrates on the research problem. It gives the complete insight into the meaning of research problem, selection of research problem, what is the necessity of defining a problem. Here author have tried to explain that with an illustration. This is the small chapter among 19 chapters but gives complete knowledge about the research problem.

            The third chapter deals with the research design. It consists of the meaning and features of the research design, need for the research design, important concepts relating to research design which includes information related to variables, research hypothesis and different research designs, basic principles of experimental designs and important experimental designs.  In the fourth chapter, the authors explain about the designs of sample survey. Which includes introduction to sample survey, sample design, sampling errors and non-sampling errors and the difference between sample survey and census survey is briefed with types of sampling designs. Chapter 4 is the smallest among all other chapters.

            The chapter 5 deals with the important part of research that is measurement and scaling. The qualitative and quantitative data are explained with good examples. Further classification of measurement scales, goodness of measurement scales, sources of errors, techniques of developing tools, scaling, scale classification and multidimensional scaling are explained. The chapter 6 deals with the data collection which is again important part of social science research. The types of data collection are explained. This book also explains about the important points to be considered while procuring secondary data and selection of appropriate method for data collection. The case study method is explained in detail in this chapter.

            The seventh chapter is on data preparation, which explains about the data preparation process in detail and also talks about the importance of statistics in research. There by this connects the next chapters which are concentrated on statistics part of the research. The eighth chapter to eighteenth chapters are concentrated on statistics. The eighth chapter deals with the descriptive statistics, which explains about skewness, measures of relationship, kurtosis.

            Ninth chapter deals with the sampling and statistical inference, which gives explanation regarding sampling and non sampling errors, sampling distribution, degree of freedom, which is important in finding the standard freedom and explains about statistical inference. Highlight of this chapter is tests of significance i.e hypothesis testing. Statistical inference is important while drawing results from the collected data. In the tenth chapter testing of hypothesis is explained in detail with lot more concepts. It talks about the definition of hypothesis and basic concepts in testing of hypothesis. Hypothesis testing for different statistical tests.

            Eleventh chapter talks about the chi-square tests and chapter twelve, explains the analysis of variance. These two chapters explain the problems on the topics and give chance to reader to learn proper steps in the calculation process. There is also scope for the reader to do exercise related to the calculation. In twelth chapter both the types of ANOVA are clearly explained. The reader can understand with explanation given by the authors.

            Chapter thirteen deals with other nonparametric methods. In this chapter, spearman’s rank correlation is used in social science research. In chapter fourteen, linear regression analysis is discussed. In that simple linear regression model, multiple linear regression model, problem of multicolinearity are explained. In addition to this in the this third edition, the authors have also included linear regression Analysis using SPSS software, which is very much useful to carry out the analysis of the data.

            Fifteenth chapter talks about the mathematical basis of factor analysis, important methods of factor analysis, rotation in factor analysis and merits and demerits of factor analysis. In this chapter, methods of factor analysis are given more importance and factor analysis using SPSS is also given in detail. In the sixteenth chapter discriminant analysis is explained.

            In the chapter seventeen, distance measures, clustering algorithms and agglomerative clustering are explained with examples and SPSS screen shots for the better understanding. Eighteenth chapter consists of other multivariate techniques like path analysis, canonical correlation, multidimensional scaling, multivariate anova and latent structure analysis.

            The last nineteenth chapter gives information on interpretation and report writing topics. This chapter is emphasized on techniques of interpreting the data, precautions to be taken while interpreting data, and significance of report writing. It also gives information regarding punctuations and abbreviations to be used in the report writing which arouses interest in reader.

            At the end authors give selected references and recommended readings that can be used for further readings.

Conclusion: overall the book was informative in many ways. The chapters are arranged in a proper order as the research process or in accordance with the research process. In the statistics part more examples and problems are given for good understanding. The present edition also has information regarding use of SPSS which is very important for a researcher to understand the statistical analysis part. The language used in the book is simple and easily understandable. A researcher who thinks research methodology is difficult to understand can read this book for better and easy understanding of the topic. Any reader can enjoy reading this book at the same time may avail very good information regarding research methodology.

How a Research Hypothesis Becomes a Theory

How a Research Hypothesis Becomes a Theory

The scientific method attempts to explain the natural occurrences (phenomena) of the universe by using a logical, consistent, systematic method of investigation, information (data) collection, data analysis (hypothesis), testing (experiment), and refinement to arrive at a well-tested, well-documented, explanation that is well-supported by evidence, called a theory.    The process of establishing a new scientific theory is necessarily a grueling one; new theories must survive an adverse gauntlet of skeptics who are experts in their particular area of science; the original theory may then need to be revised to satisfy those objections.  The typical way in which new scientific ideas are debated are through refereed scientific journals, such as Nature and Scientific American.  (Depending upon the area of science, there are many other journals specific to their respective fields that act as referees.)   Before a new theory can be officially proposed to the scientific community, it must be well-written, documented and submitted to an appropriate scientific journal for publication.  If the editors of these prestigious publications accept a research article for publication, they are signaling that the proposed theory has enough merit to be seriously debated and scrutinized closely by experts in that particular field of science.  Skeptics or proponents of alternative or opposing theories may then try to submit their research and data, while the original proponents of the proposed theory may publish new data that answers the skeptics.  It may take many years of often acrimonious debate to settle an issue, resulting in the adoption, modification, or rejection of a new theory.  For example, the Alvarez Meteorite Impact theory (a 6-mile wide meteorite struck the earth 65 million years ago, ending the Cretaceous Period and causing extinction of the dinosaurs), was first proposed in 1979, and took about 10 years of debate before winning over the majority of earth scientists.

          A successful scientific inquiry may culminate in a well-tested, well-documented explanation (theory) that is supported overwhelmingly by valid data, and often has the power to predict the outcome of certain scenarios, which may be tested by future experiments.  There are rare examples of scientific theories that have successfully survived all known attacks for a very long time, and are called scientific laws, such as Newton's Law of Gravity.

    Below is a generalized sequence of steps taken to establish a theory

1.     Choose and define the natural phenomenon that you want to figure out and explain.

2.     Collect information (data) about this phenomena by going where the phenomena occur and making observations.  Or, try to replicate this phenomena by means of a test (experiment) under controlled conditions (usually in a laboratory) that eliminates interference's from environmental conditions.

3.     After collecting a lot of data, look for patterns in the data.   Attempt to explain these patterns by making a provisional explanation, called a hypothesis.

4.     Test the hypothesis by collecting more data to see if the hypothesis continues to show the assumed pattern.  If the data does not support the hypothesis, it must be changed, or rejected in favor of a better one.  In collecting data, one must NOT ignore data that contradicts the hypothesis in favor of only supportive data.  If a refined hypothesis survives all attacks on it and is the best existing explanation for a particular phenomenon, it is then elevated to the status of a theory.

5.     A theory is subject to modification and even rejection if there is overwhelming evidence that disproves it and/or supports another, better theory.   Therefore, a theory is not an eternal or perpetual truth.

Characteristics of a Scientific Theory

Although there are many characteristics of scientific theories, there are five basic characteristics that can help one to understand how they work. A scientific theory should be:

1.      Testable: Theories can be supported through a series of scientific research projects or experiments. Sometimes a theory is proven to be wrong through evidence: this is called rejecting a theory. However, a theory can never be proven to be absolutely true because it is an interpretation. There is always a possibility that a different interpretation will someday be found to be more correct.

2.      Replicable: In other words, theories must also be able to be repeated by others. This means that enough information and data must be available in the theory so that others can test the theory and get similar results.

3.      Stable: Another characteristic of theories is that they must be stable. This means that when others test the theory, they get the same results - so a theory is valid as long as there is no evidence to dispute it.

4.      Simple: A theory should be simple. When it is said, a scientific theory must be simple, that does not mean that the concept must be basic. It means that only useful information should be presented in the theory.

5.      Consistent: A theory should agree with other theories, meaning that no principles in one theory should contradict another already accepted theory. However, some differences may be evident because the new theory may provide additional evidence.

Theories are used to advance scientific knowledge. Without theories, information that is gathered in research studies could not be put to use. New medications and treatments could not be tested, and no cures for diseases would be found.

References:

·        Saravanavel P. (1999), “Research Methodology”, Kitab Mahal, Allahabad, pp-75-77.

·        Swain, A.K.P.C (2008), “A text book of Research Methodology”, Kalyani Publishers, NewDelhi, pp-

·        Tripathi P. C (1999), “A text book of Research Methodology in Social Sciences”, Sultanchand & sons Educational Publishers,  New Delhi, pp-14-15.

Web references

·        http://www.oakton.edu/user/4/billtong/eas100/scientificmethod.htm

·        http://study.com/academy/lesson/what-is-the-scientific-theory-definition-characteristics-example.html

·         http://www.tectonicsdrivenbyclimvariation.com/-the-characteristics-of-a-good-theory-hypothesis.html

·        http://www.studylecturenotes.com/basics-of-sociology/what-are-the-functions-characteristics-of-social-theory