Higher Education Commons^™

Economic growth depends upon the wealth of goods and services that natural resources provide. Yet, over the years, as corporations pursue hefty returns on their investment, they have been depleting the natural resources so vital for economic development. After the Rio Earth Summit of 1992, however, corporations that once viewed environmentalism as a threat to their survival all of a sudden realized sustainability as a means of gaining a competitive edge; it reduced costs and stimulated greater innovation. When the program of action for the Earth Summit was reviewed in 2002 at the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in …

Higher-order thinking is one of the defining characteristics of higher education, yet the rating of such behavior has been neither reliable nor valid. Recent research involving the use of categories has yielded relatively high inter-rater reliability, with nominal categories of behavior identified. The current study applies an ordinal-scale model of hierarchical complexity (MHC) to educational tasks. The initial results suggest that the MHC can be used to score questions with varying degrees of complexity and support, and that future research should concentrate on determining the reliability and validity of this scoring system for educational purposes.