COMPARISON OF EXPERIENCED VS. NOVICE TEACHERS IN COGNITIVE REFLECTION AND RATIONALITY

"No, no! The adventures first, explanations take such a dreadful time. "Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-GlassWhen dealing with the issue of rational choices, researchers usually come with a rather bleak picture of human rationality - it seems that in most cases we are unable to consistently pick normatively correct choices. It has been shown that people will exert as little mental effort as possible and only rarely check their intuitive, albeit incorrect responses (Alter, Oppenheimer, Epley, & Eyre, 2007; De Neys, Rossi, & Houde, 2013; Sinayev & Peters, 2015). One of the solutions would be to teach people skills that would help them solve rational tasks correctly (mindware; Stanovich, 2011) and thus enhance rationality in everyday life. This suggestion seems very reasonable; however, little research has been done on whether teachers themselves possess this kind of mindware, although we often seem to expect from teachers more than is in their human power.Teachers are very important in education. According to Hattie (2003), factors related to the teacher account for about 30% of the variance in a student? s achievement. He describes a teacher as a ? person who gently closes the classroom door and performs the teaching act - the person who puts into place the end effects of so many policies, who interprets these policies, and who is alone with students during their 15,000 hours of schooling? (Hattie, 2003, p. 2-3). Among the prototypical attributes of expertise in teaching, he lists five that are directly related to the teacher? s decision making, planning and rationality. For example, according to Hattie (2003) an expert teacher, due to extensive practice, is able to rely on automatization of cognitive skills and this enables him/ her to free working memory to deal with other more complex characteristics of the situation. Together with deeper representations about teaching and learning, it also makes the teacher better in recognizing sequences of events occurring in the classroom that in some way affect the learning and teaching of a topic. Thus, the teacher can make better predictions and decisions about the next course of events. Large repertoire of various teaching situations helps him/her to better anticipate, plan, and improvise as required by the situation. Recognizing patterns in these various teaching situations also allows for better decision-making and identification of more or less important decisions. From this brief description it is already clear that what distinguishes an expert teacher from a merely experienced one are the abilities of deeper reflection of the teaching situation, better planning and decision-making. This is in line with findings from studies using expert populations in real life settings (Klein, 1998). Research in education psychology often concentrates on comparing effectiveness of various teaching styles and personality of teachers, but relatively little is known about actual cognitive skills and thinking dispositions of teachers. Thinking dispositions are, however, one of the crucial aspects of rationality with practical consequences. Pennycook, Fugelsang, and Koehler (2015) showed that the mere willingness to engage analytical thinking as means to overcome intuitive ? internal feeling? is a significant predictor of real-world behavior and decision making. For example, more analytical thinkers are more skeptical towards religious, paranormal, and conspiracy concepts. The few studies that have been conducted in Slovakia examining critical thinking of highschool teachers show that teachers of secondary schools achieved unsatisfactory results in critical thinking. Compared to their British counterparts, Slovak teachers scored about 23.10 points lower, and the best Slovak respondent reached only the 20th percentile of the British sample (Kosturkov? , 2013), which is rather an alarming finding. Kosturkov? (2013) used the Watson-Glasser test of critical thinking in her studies, which is a rather long and difficult measure. …