Policy decisions at the organizational, corporate, and governmental levels should be more heavily influenced by issues related to well-being––people’s evaluations and feelings about their lives. Domestic policy currently focuses heavily on economic outcomes, although economic indicators omit, and even mislead about, much of what society values. We show that economic indicators have many shortcomings, and that measures of well-being point to important conclusions that are not apparent from economic indicators alone. For example, although economic output has risen steeply over the past decades, there has been no rise in life satisfaction during this period, and there has been a substantial increase in depression and distrust. We argue that economic indicators were extremely important in the early stages of economic development, when the fulfillment of basic needs was the main issue. As societies grow wealthy,

Abstract. Gaming the system, attempting to succeed in an interactive learning environment by exploiting properties of the system rather than by learning the material (for example, by systematically guessing or abusing hints), is prevalent across many types of educational software. Past research on why students choose to game has focused on student individual differences. Many student individual differences, including attitudes towards mathematics, have been shown to be associated with gaming, but generally with low correlation. In this paper, we investigate how individual differences between learning environments can increase or decrease the probability of gaming. We enumerate ways intelligent tutor lessons vary from each other, and use data mining to discover hypotheses about how differences in software design and content influence the choice to game the system. We discover a set of tutor features that explain 56 % of the variance in gaming, over five times the degree of variance explained in any prior study of student individual differences and gaming. These results provide an important step towards developing prescriptions for designing intelligent tutor software that students game significantly less.

Women remain underrepresented in computer technology careers and university majors, and adolescent girls shy away from high school computer science courses. More information is needed about females who are attracted to computer technology. This study described the online activities of young adolescent girls ages 12-14 who are highend users of computer technology. Three developmental tasks of adolescence (search for identity, pursuit of social connections, and desire for a sense of competence and accomplishment) were used to frame explorations of the girls' online activities. Eight girls were interviewed, the personal web sites of six girls were analyzed, and postings on a message board for young girls interested in online activities were reviewed. Patterns and themes that emerged from the data indicated that Internet technology was an effective match for the informants' developmental tasks. Specific inferences included: (1) Online technologies offered the informants multiple ways of negotiating social relationships; (2) Internet use supported the informants' engagement in personalized, selfdirected, and self-initiated learning; (3) Support from parents, siblings, and peers iii provided the environment for each girl to develop confidence and competence in Internet use; and (4) The informants' use of the Internet reflected women's ways of knowing. iv Dedication I dedicate this study to the memory of my mother and father. Their lives and their love are etched in my past, my present, and my future. My mother gave me the knowledge that women are strong and powerful in ways often subtle and surprising. My father gave me a fascination with new technology and an appreciation for being "different." He taught me to treasure the moment. Both of my parents would have eagerly em...

This research could not have been conducted without the help of many people. I would like to thank the students, teachers, and administrators who enthusiastically participated in this study. Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has been a continual source of insight and support. He provided the comparison data and was a co-investigator on the project. Annette Haines, as research associate, put in an enormous amount of time and passion and was essential for the success of the project. Julie Carmalt provided invaluable help at the University of Utah. The O’Shaughnessy Foundation, Dekko Foundation, and Hershey Foundation provided essential financial support. Finally, I would like to thank David Kahn for seeing the connections between Montessori philosophy and optimal experience theory and having the courage to initiate a study that compared Montessori schools to traditional middle schools.

This paper relates a series of current development in the literature of economics and psychology as they relate to decision making by households and business firms. The first part of the paper reviews recent literature dealing with happiness and subjective wellbeing. In the second part of the paper recent developments in management science that make use of intuition and mental focus are related to firm profitability and improved economic efficiency. Both of these recent developments can provide critical insights into improving the “bottom line ” performance of policy makers, managers and society as a whole at both the macroeconomic and microeconomic levels. These ideas are then used to design to and develop a series of policy suggestions that refocus attention on the concept of subjective well being or happiness as opposed to economic utility maximization as well as the role of intuition and the concept of “flow ” in the decision making process. of top managers. We can summarize these ideas succinctly by focusing on two sets of variables relating to decision making and decision outcome in a two by two matrix summarized in the Table