This article presents standards for setting up and educating institutional ethics committees (IECs). These standards are based on experiences in the Netherlands, where IECs have been established in a large number of health care institutions. Though the IEC has become a generally accepted institution within Dutch health care, there are concerns over its effectiveness regarding the improving of the moral quality of clinical decision making. Health care practitioners and members of IECs too, experience a gap between the IEC and the (...) reality of the clinical environment. At this moment, there is interest in developing programmes which educate practitioners in moral issues and how to deal with them, using the method of a structured debate on the ward. The IEC will not be made obsolete by this development, but can play a guiding role in the implementation of such programmes. Current concerns are the lack of patient representation in the Dutch IEC, and the loss of contact with the local community of health care practitioners because of the merger of hospitals into bodies similar to UK National Health Service (NHS) trusts. (shrink)

Huttenlocher et al. (J Exp Psychol Gen 129:220–241, 2000) introduce the category adjustment model (CAM). Given that participants imperfectly remember stimuli (which we refer to as “targets”), CAM holds that participants maximize accuracy by using information about the distribution of the targets to improve their judgments. CAM predicts that judgments will be a weighted average of the imperfect memory of the target and the mean of the distribution of targets. Huttenlocher et al. (2000) report on three experiments and conclude that (...) CAM is “verified”. We attempt to replicate the conditions in Experiment 3 from Huttenlocher et al. (2000). We analyze judgment-level data rather than averaged data. We find evidence of a bias toward a set of recent targets rather than a bias toward the running mean. We do not find evidence of learning. The judgments in our dataset are not consistent with CAM. We discuss other defects in HHV—including dividing by zero. It seems that evidence for CAM is a statistical artifact that appears when researchers analyze data averaged across trials and do not consider a recency bias. (shrink)

I bestræbelsen på at placere et gennemført forskningsprojekt undersøges om det kan knyttes an til den åndsvidenskabelige pædagogik, der i Tyskland og Nederlandene dominerede den akademiske pædagogik i den første to tredjedel af det 20. århundrede. Der var gode grunde til at denne akademiske disciplin blev udkonkurreret at hhv. en empirisk-analytisk og en kritisk-emancipatorisk tilgang, men udfordringen af at etablere en pædagogisk videnskab der hverken er teknisk eller normativ er fortsat aktuel. Den åndsvidenskabelige pædagogik fik sin egenart af, at den (...) søgte at manifestere sig på feltet mellem det man kan vide om barnet og det barnet kan blive til. I en kritisk gennemgang foreslås, at det er muligt at holde fast ved ønsket om en pædagogisk videnskab om og for praksis, når man forankrer den i pædagogikkens karakter af at være et projekt. Pædagogik bliver derved til en handlingsvidenskab, der er hjemsted for forskningsprojekter som det projekt der præsenteres i artiklens begyndelse. (shrink)