Thinking Styles - Academics vs Students
In collaboration with the Edinburgh Physics Education Group, I've recently been looking at how students think, and particularly the role of intuitive thinking has when students answer questions in Newtonian Mechanics.
We presented this work on 'thinking styles', or Dual Processing Theory as a poster at the recent Vice-Phec conference (The full peer-reviewed paper is available from Physical Review, Physics Education Research (open access)) and Tom Husband (@rhymingchemist) has written a lovely summary of this work.
The poster invited participants to take a short online quiz, known as the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT). The quiz is still open if you want to give it a go- though I recommend doing this before reading the rest of the blog.
The CRT questions are designed to cue an intuitive (but wrong) answer. In order to get the question right you have to reflect on your answer, realise that it is wrong, reject this answer, and calculate the correct answer. Dual processing theory describes two types of thinking - system 1 which is intuitive and automatic and system 2 which is more reflective and takes more effort. The CRT therefore tests people's tendency to either use predominantly system 1 or system 2 thinking.
We gave the quiz to participants mainly for fun, and so they could experience the CRT for themselves, but the results have turned out to be quite interesting.
There were 36 people who answered the quiz, but 9 had seen the questions before, so that has left a sample of 27. That's fairly small to do any sort of rigorous analysis, but is useful for a quick comparison. We didn't ask about education level or job, but it is a reasonable assumption that most are involved with teaching at either higher education level, or in a few cases, A-level. All but 4 were either physicists or chemists.
The key finding is that the participants scores were very similar those of the 148 students in our published study.
The percentage of quiz participants answering each question correctly was:
Q1 70%
Q2 70%
Q3 85%
This compares remarkably well with our students' results (Q1 74%, Q2 71%, 87%).
we also calculated each person's CRT Score (where 3 is the maximum, corresponding to getting all questions correct) and found the following distribution:
3) 52%
2) 26%
1) 19%
0) 4% (i.e. 1 person)
Again, we see extremely good agreement with the students in our study (score 3, 57% score 2, 22%, score 1 16%, score 0 5%)
Finally, the average CRT score overall was 2.35, compared to 2.31 for our students
What is remarkable is that these results are so similar. The literature would suggest that these two groups have different thinking processes. For example the work by Chi (1) comparing how experts and novices solve physics problems found significant differences in the approaches used by each group, with novices grouping problems by surface features, while experts group them by underlying physics concepts.
Work on epistemologies (i.e. people's ideas about knowledge, how it is formed and how it develops) shows similar differences. (See for example Perry's scheme of intellectual development)
One explanation may be simply that the CRT is not very good at distinguishing between people at the top end of the scale, i.e. any differences between students and lecturers are not measurable by the CRT.
Certainly more work needs to take place before any firm conclusions can be reached.
Footnote: We definitely cannot say anything about physicists compared to chemists, as only 4 physicists took the quiz. But I can reveal that all 4 (2 male, 2 female) got all the questions correct!
1) Chi, Michelene TH, Paul J. Feltovich, and Robert Glaser. "Categorization and representation of physics problems by experts and novices." Cognitive science 5.2 (1981): 121-152.
2) Perry Jr, William G. Forms of Intellectual and Ethical Development in the College Years: A Scheme. Jossey-Bass Higher and Adult Education Series. Jossey-Bass Publishers, 350 Sansome St., San Francisco, CA 94104, 1999.
Thinking Styles - Academics vs Students by Anna Wood is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
We presented this work on 'thinking styles', or Dual Processing Theory as a poster at the recent Vice-Phec conference (The full peer-reviewed paper is available from Physical Review, Physics Education Research (open access)) and Tom Husband (@rhymingchemist) has written a lovely summary of this work.
The poster invited participants to take a short online quiz, known as the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT). The quiz is still open if you want to give it a go- though I recommend doing this before reading the rest of the blog.
The CRT questions are designed to cue an intuitive (but wrong) answer. In order to get the question right you have to reflect on your answer, realise that it is wrong, reject this answer, and calculate the correct answer. Dual processing theory describes two types of thinking - system 1 which is intuitive and automatic and system 2 which is more reflective and takes more effort. The CRT therefore tests people's tendency to either use predominantly system 1 or system 2 thinking.
We gave the quiz to participants mainly for fun, and so they could experience the CRT for themselves, but the results have turned out to be quite interesting.
There were 36 people who answered the quiz, but 9 had seen the questions before, so that has left a sample of 27. That's fairly small to do any sort of rigorous analysis, but is useful for a quick comparison. We didn't ask about education level or job, but it is a reasonable assumption that most are involved with teaching at either higher education level, or in a few cases, A-level. All but 4 were either physicists or chemists.
The key finding is that the participants scores were very similar those of the 148 students in our published study.
The percentage of quiz participants answering each question correctly was:
Q1 70%
Q2 70%
Q3 85%
This compares remarkably well with our students' results (Q1 74%, Q2 71%, 87%).
we also calculated each person's CRT Score (where 3 is the maximum, corresponding to getting all questions correct) and found the following distribution:
3) 52%
2) 26%
1) 19%
0) 4% (i.e. 1 person)
Again, we see extremely good agreement with the students in our study (score 3, 57% score 2, 22%, score 1 16%, score 0 5%)
Finally, the average CRT score overall was 2.35, compared to 2.31 for our students
What is remarkable is that these results are so similar. The literature would suggest that these two groups have different thinking processes. For example the work by Chi (1) comparing how experts and novices solve physics problems found significant differences in the approaches used by each group, with novices grouping problems by surface features, while experts group them by underlying physics concepts.
Work on epistemologies (i.e. people's ideas about knowledge, how it is formed and how it develops) shows similar differences. (See for example Perry's scheme of intellectual development)
One explanation may be simply that the CRT is not very good at distinguishing between people at the top end of the scale, i.e. any differences between students and lecturers are not measurable by the CRT.
Certainly more work needs to take place before any firm conclusions can be reached.
Footnote: We definitely cannot say anything about physicists compared to chemists, as only 4 physicists took the quiz. But I can reveal that all 4 (2 male, 2 female) got all the questions correct!
1) Chi, Michelene TH, Paul J. Feltovich, and Robert Glaser. "Categorization and representation of physics problems by experts and novices." Cognitive science 5.2 (1981): 121-152.
2) Perry Jr, William G. Forms of Intellectual and Ethical Development in the College Years: A Scheme. Jossey-Bass Higher and Adult Education Series. Jossey-Bass Publishers, 350 Sansome St., San Francisco, CA 94104, 1999.
Thinking Styles - Academics vs Students by Anna Wood is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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