The transfer of logically general scientific reasoning skills

The transfer of logically general scientific reasoning skills Anthony M. Harrison (anh23@pitt.edu) Christian D. Schunn (schunn@pitt.edu) Department of Psychology, University of Pittsburgh 3939 O’Hara St Pittsburgh, PA 15260 USA between the practicing scientists and the novices could not be accounted for by general reasoning ability differences. This leaves two alternative explanations: context of the problem influencing the transfer of the skills, and scientific training itself. While the studies conducted by Schraagen (1993) and Schunn and Anderson (1999) seem to point towards the influence of scientific training, there is a problem with interpreting it in that way. Both of these studies utilized highly similar groups of experts (all were experimental psychologists of some sort). The similarity of the domains of expertise might be confounding the influence of context on transfer. While the experiments were designed such that the task would be unfamiliar to one of the expert groups, it is likely that they were familiar enough to provide sufficient context cues to trigger the use of the appropriate scientific strategies. The novices, however, would not have had the cues to signal which strategies would be appropriate. If the studies had utilized more dissimilar experts this would not have been an issue. As it is, the transfer context remains a confounding factor. Voss et al. (1986) provide some support for the transfer hypothesis. Their studies looking at the problem solving of novices and dissimilar experts found that the quality of the reasoning was dependent upon the match of the task to the expert's domain. They report chemists' reasoning being roughly equivalent to that of the novices when attempting to solve political science problems, while the political scientists exhibited a higher quality of reasoning on the same tasks. However, while the Schraagen and Schunn & Anderson studies utilized science-based domains that were overly similar, the Voss, et al. study utilized a non-science-based domain. This makes comparisons across the studies problematic. The difficulty of transferring skills from one context to another has long been a recognized problem (e.g. Thorndike & Woodworth, 1901; Singley & Anderson, 1989; Detterman, 1992). Singley and Anderson propose that transfer can only occur between two situations for identical elements. This transfer then depends on how the elements were encoded. If researchers only use scientific reasoning skills when faced with problems in their domain, it is possible that they will be coded in a manner that is specific to that context. It would therefore be unlikely that they would use the strategies when those context cues were absent. So in this situation, the Abstract Extending the paradigm introduced by Schraagen (1993), two near-expert groups and novices completed two scientific discovery tasks, one from each of the experts’ domains. In this way, both groups designed simulated experiments from within and outside of their domain. The role of domain familiarity on the application of general scientific reasoning skills is explored by contrasting the performance of the experts in their domain to that in the unfamiliar domain. Results indicate that at the graduate level, near-experts are able to apply general scientific reasoning skills across dissimilar domains, while novices still have difficulty with the transfer. Introduction How common are scientific reasoning skills across different domains of practice? Schraagen (1993) as well as Schunn and Anderson (1999) address this issue in their experiments. Both studies relied on the same basic paradigm: two groups of expert researchers and one group of novices were asked to design and conduct a series of experiments in a scientific discovery task. One of the expert groups was familiar with the domain that the task was drawn from (e.g. cognitive psychologists working on a memory experiment), whereas the other was less familiar with the domain, but still from the same general field (e.g. social psychology). The scientific reasoning skills (e.g. experimental design, hypothesis generation, and data evaluation) exhibited by both expert groups were similar and mapped cleanly onto those mentioned in the literature (e.g. Klahr & Dunbar, 1988; Dunbar, 1993; Chinn & Malhotra, 1999). The novices showed a similar pattern of failures as those found by other researchers focusing on non-scientists (e.g. Kuhn, Schauble & Garcia- Mila, 1992; Klahr, Fay & Dunbar, 1993; Zajchowski & Martin, 1993). Almost all studies that have focused on non-scientists have found remarkably poor performance (see Detterman, 1992 for a review) on scientific reasoning skills. Fortunately, those that have studied practicing scientists in their own domain have found just the opposite (e.g. Dunbar, 1997). Why is it that expert scientists do so well outside of their domain of expertise, yet novices do so poorly? Schunn and Anderson (1999), as well as Schraagen (1993), report that the differences found