Children’s Cognitive Reflection Skills Predict Their Conceptual Learning

The Cognitive Reflection Test, measuring intuition inhibition and cognitive reflection, has become extremely popular because it reliably predicts reasoning performance, decision-making, and beliefs. Across studies, the response format of CRT items sometimes differs, based on the assumed construct equivalence of tests with open-ended versus multiple-choice items (the equivalence hypothesis). Evidence and theoretical reasons, however, suggest that the cognitive processes measured by these response formats and their associated performances might differ (the nonequivalence hypothesis). We tested the two hypotheses experimentally by assessing the performance in tests with different response formats and by comparing their predictive and construct validity. In a between-subjects experiment (n = 452), participants answered stem-equivalent CRT items in an open-ended, a two-option, or a four-option response format and then completed tasks on belief bias, denominator neglect, and paranormal beliefs (benchmark indicators of predictive validity), as well as on actively open-minded thinking and numeracy (benchmark indicators of construct validity). We found no significant differences between the three response formats in the numbers of correct responses, the numbers of intuitive responses (with the exception of the two-option version, which had a higher number than the other tests), and the correlational patterns of the indicators of predictive and construct validity. All three test versions were similarly reliable, but the multiple-choice formats were completed more quickly. We speculate that the specific nature of the CRT items helps build construct equivalence among the different response formats. We recommend using the validated multiple-choice version of the CRT presented here, particularly the four-option CRT, for practical and methodological reasons. Supplementary materials and data are available at https://osf.io/mzhyc/ .

The cognitive reflection test (CRT) became popular for its impressive power to predict how well people reason and make decisions. Despite the popularity of the CRT, a major issue complicates its interpretation: The numerical nature of the CRT confounds reflection ability with mathematical ability. We have addressed this issue by developing the verbal CRT (CRT‐V), a novel 10‐item measure of cognitive reflection (https://osf.io/xehbv/), using nonmathematical problems with good statistical and psychometric properties and with low familiarity. First, we selected suitable items with relatively low familiarity and optimal difficulty as identified in two different populations (Studies 1 and 2) and with high content validity as judged by an expert panel (Study 3). Second, we demonstrated good criterion and construct validity for the test in different populations with a wide range of variables (Studies 4–6, 8) and a good internal consistency (Studies 4–8) and test–retest reliability (Study 7). The CRT‐V was less associated with math anxiety, objective and subjective numeracy than the original CRT, and it was test equivalent across gender, age groups and administration setting. In contrast with the original CRT (Hedge's g = 0.29, 95% confidence interval [CI] [0.17, 0.40]), the CRT‐V showed no gender differences (Hedge's g = −0.06, 95% CI [−0.18, 0.06]). The CRT‐V can complement existing, numerical, tests of cognitive reflection.

IntroductionCognitive reflection is the ability and disposition to reflect on one's own thinking, allowing a person to identify and correct judgments grounded in intuition rather than logic. Cognitive reflection strongly predicts school-aged children's understanding of counterintuitive science concepts. Here, we asked whether children's cognitive reflection similarly predicts a domain-general scientific skill: the interpretation of covariation data.MethodFive- to 12-year-olds (N = 74) completed a children's Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT-D) and measures of executive functioning. They also interpreted covariation data presented in 2 x 2 contingency tables.Results and discussionCRT-D performance predicted children's overall accuracy and the strategies they used to evaluate the contingency tables, even after adjusting for their age, set-shifting ability, inhibitory control, and working memory. Thus, the relationship between cognitive reflection and statistical reasoning emerges early in development. These findings suggest cognitive reflection is broadly involved in children's scientific thinking, supporting domain-general data-interpretation skills in addition to domain-specific conceptual knowledge.

Inquiry-based learning is an active learning method which has found to be beneficial for developing students’ inquiry skills and enhancing academic achievement, engagement, motivation. Inquiry-based learning is widely used in science and math classes in general education schools, but despite the benefits of using inquiry-based learning, this approach is less used in higher education institutions. Still, some good examples can be found, but in higher education level the concept of inquiry-based learning is used in a broader sense and in many different forms (e.g., progressive inquiry). The focus is mostly on formulating questions and answering them through investigation of different materials and theories. This chapter gives an overview of some examples on how inquiry-based learning has been implemented in higher education institutions on three levels: systematically in curricula, separate courses of inquiry-based learning, and inquiry-based learning as part of a course. Additionally, the benefits of using inquiry-based learning in higher education are pointed out and the challenges of implementing inquiry-based learning are discussed on organization level, teacher level and student level.KeywordsInquiry-based learningProgressive inquiryHigher education

This study investigates the cognitive processes underlying chess expertise by examining planning, cognitive reflection, inter-temporal choice, and risky choice in chess players. The study involves 25 chess players and 25 non-chess players, comparing their performance on the Tower of London (TOL) task, Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT), inter-temporal choice (ITC), and risky choice tasks. Results indicate that chess players outperform non-chess players in TOL and CRT, showing superior planning and cognitive reflection abilities. Chess players also prefer future rewards over immediate ones in ITC, suggesting a higher propensity for future more rewarding options. In risky choice tasks, chess players made more decisions based on expected value than non-chess players, but the evidence in favour of differences between groups is very weak. Despite this study not being able to establish causality, the findings highlight the cognitive advantages associated with chess expertise and suggest potential areas for further research on the transfer of cognitive skills from chess to other domains and differences in general abilities between experts and novices.

The validity of individual difference variables for predicting important life phenomena, such as job performance, has been studied for over a century. However, the relationships between some of them have scarcely been investigated. This paper presents a study on the relationship between cognitive reflection (CR), satisfaction with life (SWL), and emotional balance (EB) with job performance. The participants were 245 managers (140 men and 105 women) working in companies in various economic sectors. The results showed that CR was not significantly related to job performance but that SWL and EB were valid predictors. Moreover, CR correlated significantly with SWL and EB. Multiple regression analysis showed that neither CR nor EB showed incremental validity over SWL in predicting job performance. These findings suggest that CR may not be an important variable in the workplace, at least regarding job performance, and that it is not a fully cognitive construct because some degree of its variance may be shared with motivational and personality traits.

Cognitive decoupling (the ability to distinguish supposition from belief and run thought experiments) is considered one of the key mechanisms in mindfulness, cognitive reflection and reasoning. Therefore, the present study examined whether a brief mindfulness exercise that explicitly encourages cognitive decoupling can increase cognitive reflection and reasoning. A total of 156 first- and second-year undergraduate students were randomly allocated to either a mindfulness or control condition, before listening to a 15-min audio recording. The mindfulness audio was a recording of the leaves on a stream exercise that focussed on how to dissociate from thoughts (decentring), whereas the control audio was a recording of a book prologue. Cognitive reflection and reasoning were measured through the expanded cognitive reflection test and a syllogistic reasoning test, both of which encourage an incorrect automatic response rather than a correct rational response. The five-facet mindfulness questionnaire-short form and the rational-experiential inventory were also administered as trait measures of mindfulness and thinking style (intuitive or rational), respectively. The results showed no significant difference between the mindfulness and control conditions on either of the cognitive tests. However, there was a significant positive correlation between trait mindfulness and trait rationality (r = 0.56). Further analyses showed that the mindfulness subscales of observing, describing, detaching, and acting mindfully were all significant predictors of trait rationality. Trait mindfulness and trait rationality are moderately associated, although more research is required to determine whether mindfulness training can increase cognitive reflection and reasoning.

Lack of Deliberation Drives Honesty Among Men But Not Women

Inquiry-based learning (IBL) is gaining popularity in science education worldwide. Unfortunately, many teachers are yet to comprehend its pedagogical modulus operandi especially in West Africa and Nigeria, in particular, maybe due to their teaching conception that is still inclined towards teacher-centred paradigm. This paper is targeted at finding out the teachers’ teaching conception towards IBL in secondary schools in Kebbi State, Nigeria. Promoting Inquiry-based learning in Science and Mathematics (PRIMAS) questionnaire was administered to a sample of 85 Physics secondary school teachers in Kebbi State. Discriptive statistics was used to arrived at a mean value of 2.74 which represent the value of the physics teachers conception. Inadequate knowledge of IBL, teachers’ difficulty to apply the method, current practices (national curriculum and lack of adequate instructional materials) were found to be some of the respondents’ major conception. Professional development programs, curriculum review and IBL teachers’ welfare were some of the suggestions offered to improve the teaching conception towards IBL.

The dictator game (DG) is one of the simplest and most commonly used experimental games for examining economic and altruistic behaviors. Altruism became crucial in research on decisions in experimental and behavioral economy. This study extends existing research on the relationship between cognitive performance, measured by the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) and the DG, taking into account such factors as gender and declared religiosity. The research assesses whether gender and declared religiosity affect altruistic behavior measured in the DG’s payoffs. 511 participants (master’s students in economics) were asked to respond to six types of DGs and the CRT7 test. Correlation analysis, descriptive statistics, student t-tests, the Mann-Whitney test and Tobit regression analysis were conducted. Cognitive reflection was positively correlated with rational (selfish) behavior in the DG. Those dictators who scored high on the CRT (reflective dictators) kept more money for themselves than those who achieved lower scores on the CRT (altruistic, impulsive dictators). The results confirmed a distinct, inequity aversion attitude among altruistic, impulsive dictators and a selfish attitude among reflective dictators. The dictator’s payoff was significantly related to the gender and declared religiosity of the participants. Women were more concerned about equal distribution of income than men (on average they shared 30% more than men) and religious agents shared 20%–30% more than non-believers.

The current study, involving 219 teachers and 15,292 students, examined the relationship between teacher participation in a sustained professional development intervention designed to improve the quantity and quality of guided inquiry-based instruction in middle school science classrooms and subsequent student academic growth. Utilizing a quasi-experimental design, the growth scores of students of participating and non-participating teachers were compared to a benchmark measure established by a virtual comparison group (VCG) of similarly matched students. The results indicate that for all three MAP tests (Scientific Practices, Science Concepts, Science Composite) the students of participating teachers had significantly higher than expected growth relative to the VCG when compared to students of non-participants. In addition, students of teachers who participated in the PD intervention consistently exceeded the growth expectations of the benchmark VCG by up to 82 %. This study supports prior research findings that inquiry-based instruction helps improve students’ achievement relative to scientific practices and also provides evidence of increasing student conceptual knowledge.

This study explores how school-aged children conceive relevant sources in learning how to draw the human figure: a live model, a photograph, a drawing and thought. Our purpose was to identify children´s preferences in this regard, to study their evaluation of the potential for help they see in those sources, and analyse whether those justifications were related to children’s developmental-educational level. Sixty children from first (20), third (20) and fifth year of elementary school (20) were interviewed individually. Children’s preferences did not vary according to school level, but their justifications regarding the value of each source did. A developmental trend in the direction of a more flexible consideration of the drawer/learner’s agency and of an incipient epistemological multiplism was found. Results contribute to two fields of developmental-educational research: development of graphical representation and conceptions of learning and knowledge.

Will people maintain their initial intuitive decision even when they know the rational answer is different? Some dual-process models assume that there is a process of detection and correction of initial intuitive biases. But do these models also account for patterns of behaviour that some people exhibit when they return to their initial intuitive response, even after acknowledging the rational response? Over four studies we tested for acquiescence by asking participants to solve congruent and incongruent problems utilising a three-response decision paradigm, manipulating base-rate and ratios as well as measuring both Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) and Rational-Experiential Inventory (REI) responses. Results suggest that for incongruent problems participants demonstrated acquiescence across all studies. In addition, although individuals appear to be more rational, and can explicitly recognise the rational response, in some case when moderated by task characteristics, and cognitive reflection, they are unable to supress their initial intuitive decision.

The current dissertation proposes three manners in which findings about the neuroscience of decision-making can inform traditional questions in economics that historically has been investigated using choice data alone, and without delineating the mechanism of choice. The first chapter investigates the origins of a critical component of both economic and perceptual decision-making under uncertainty: the belief formation process. Most research has studied belief formation in economic and perceptual decision-making in isolation. One reason for this separate treatment may be the assumption that there are distinct psychological mechanisms that underlie belief formation in economic and perceptual decisions. An alternative theory is that there exists a common mechanism that governs belief formation in both domains. Here,we test this alternative theory by combining a novel computational modeling technique with two well-known experimental paradigms. I estimate a drift-diffusion model (DDM) and provide an analytical method to decode prior beliefs from DDM parameters. Subjects in our experiment exhibit strong extrapolative beliefs in both paradigms. In line with the common mechanism hypothesis, we find that a single computational model explains belief formation in both tasks, and that individual differences in belief formation are correlated across tasks. These results suggest that extrapolative beliefs in economic decision-making may stem from low-level automatic processes that also play a role in perceptual decision-making, and therefore might be difficult to suppress. The second chapter investigates the role of the sex steroid hormone testosterone as a biological mediator that translates environmental changes into shifts in cognition, that influence decision-making. Correlational studies have linked testosterone with aggression and disorders associated with poor impulse control, but corresponding mechanisms are poorly understood and there is no evidence of causality. Building on a dual-process framework, I identify a mechanism for testosterone’s behavioral effects in humans: reducing cognitive reflection. In the largest testosterone administration study to date, 243 men received either testosterone or placebo and took the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) that estimated their capacity to override incorrect intuitive judgments with deliberate correct responses. Testosterone administration reduced CRT scores. The effect was robust to controlling for age, mood, math skills, treatment expectancy, and 14 other hormones. The effects were enhanced in subjects with high cortisol and estradiol levels. These findings suggest a unified mechanism underlying testosterone’s varied behavioral effects in humans and provide novel, clear, and testable predictions. In the third chapter, I study dynamic unstructured bargaining with deadlines and one-sided private information about the amount available to share (the “pie size). Using mechanism design theory, I show that given the players’ incentives, the equilibrium incidence of bargaining failures (“strikes”) should increase with the pie size, and I derive a condition under which strikes are efficient. In our setting, no equilibrium satisfies both equality and efficiency in all pie sizes. I derive two equilibria that resolve the trade-off between equality and efficiency by either favoring equality or favoring efficiency. Using a novel experimental paradigm, I confirm that strike incidence is decreasing in the pie size. Subjects reach equal splits in small pie games (in which strikes are efficient), while most payoffs are close to either the efficient or the equal equilibrium prediction when the pie is large. I employ a machine learning approach to show that bargaining process features recorded early in the game improve out of sample prediction of disagreements at the deadline. The process feature predictions are as accurate as predictions from pie sizes only, and adding process and pie data together improve predictions even more. As process data can be much richer than the series of cursor locations that we have used (for example, by including skin conductance, pupil dilation or facial expressions), better inference of outcome variables is likely feasible. Thus, if a policy maker or a mediator can access an independent measure of private information, an arbitration mechanism may allow boosting efficiency by taking this measurement into account.

Background: Mindful eating has been described as significant in motivating research and clinical outcomes in weight regulation and healthy eating. The use of psychometric tools to measure mindful eating is problematic, with results often leading to interpretations that are not reflective of mindful eating theory and fundamentals of mindfulness. Aim: In this research, we explored the Mindful Eating Behaviour Scale (MEBS) within a British sample to validate the factorial structure, and widen the use of a scale that appears appropriate for measuring mindful eating. Methods: A community sample (n = 742) was recruited via social media, and the findings supported the factorial structure proposed through the original Dutch sample. Predictive validity was also assessed, with the scale and subscales predicting fat and sugar consumption. Results: Cronbach's α values were acceptable and similar to the original findings, also supporting the internal consistency of the scale. Conclusion: While factorial structure, predictive validity and internal consistency propose a scale that can be adopted with English speaking populations, we propose the potential of furthering scientific inquiry on mindful eating research by highlighting the behavioural aspects of the scale.