Intentional Self-Regulation (ISR) – broadly defined, goal-directed behavior – is an important skill in promoting positive and adaptive development across the life span. The Selection-Optimization-Compensation (SOC) model of ISR describes goal …
Intentional Self-Regulation (ISR) or, more broadly, goal-directed behavior, is an essential skill in promoting positive and adaptive healthy development across the life-span. The Selection-Optimization-Compensation (SOC) model of ISR has described …
The military environment presents an intersection between a setting featuring unavoidable risk and individual risk-taking propensity; prior work suggests risk-takers have positive and negative outcomes here, and messaging about risk-taking in the …
Preliminary findings suggest that ISR is a significant predictor of cadet rank ascension between initial entry and graduation from USMA.
Contemporary models of character development emphasize that character is a malleable outcome of individual-context relations. Positive character, or character virtues, vary in relation to specific contextual circumstances requiring the enactment of specific behaviors that are morally appropriate and necessary for positive individual-context relations to occur. The exploration of the features of character virtue development that arise in specific contexts points to the role of educational institutions as key settings wherein character develops, including higher education institutions whose fundamental mission is to train leaders of character. This potential value for understanding how leaders of character are “produced” within such an institution was a key basis of Project Arête, a study of the pathways of character virtue development and leadership traversed by the cadets within the United States Military Academy (USMA) at West Point. We discuss the theoretical and methodological ideas we have used within Project Arête to shape our assessments of character development and leadership, and focus on issues involved in the design, measurement, and analysis of developmental changes in individuals, context, and individual- context relations.