the psychology of learning and motivation - Percepts and Concepts ...

The Ubiquitous Patterns of Incorrect Answers to Science Questions 2551997; van der Linden, 2008), or to detect cheating (van der Linden &van Krimpen-Stoop, 2003). However, for the questions used in thisstudy, students answered in patterned ways, and thus they are notguessing (e.g., see Heckler et al., 2010).In sum, some patterns in responses to science questions may arise fromlower level implicit decision criteria (e.g., answer quickly) rather thanfrom some higher level conceptual understanding. The influence of thislower level process can be significant enough to mask a student’s overallability to determine the correct answer. The hypothesis that students willtend to base their answer on the plausible information that is processed thefastest makes testable predictions about response times as well as responsechoices. Not only is there some existing evidence to support this hypothesis,but there are also many possibilities of testing it further by designingexperiments that include the capture of response time data as well asresponse choice data.7.2. High salience of irrelevant cues: attentional learningCompetition can also be manifested in terms of allocation of attention.When two or more cues are present, it is often the case that one of themcaptures most of the attention. This phenomenon of cue competition isfundamental to a wide range of learning and behavior. For example,decades of studies in category learning have identified two major factorsthat determine which cues are learned and which are ignored among amultitude of competing cues in the environment: learners tend to learncues that are relatively salient, predictive, or both (e.g., see Edgell, Bright,Ng, Noonan, & Ford, 1992; Hall, 1991; Trabasso & Bower, 1968). Thereare a number of successful models that can explain the trade-off betweenthe salience and predictiveness of a dimension in terms of learnedattention(e.g., Kruschke, 2001; Mackintosh, 1975). In our recent work, collaboratorsand I have provided evidence that when low-salient cues repeatedlycompete with high-salient cues, the low-salient cues are learned to beignored, even if they are more predictive than the high-salient cues(Heckler, Kaminski, & Sloutsky, 2008; 2011). This learned inattention tolow-salient yet predictive information may contribute to the students’difficulties in correctly answering science questions and learning scienceconcepts.How can attentional learning lead to incorrect answering on sciencequestions? Science concepts involve highly predictive cues, but thesepredictive cues can be of relatively low salience. For example, the accelerationof an object uniquely predicts the net force on that object, yetacceleration is often less salient than velocity (e.g., Schmerler, 1976), andstudents often infer the net force on an object from the velocity of theobject rather than its acceleration (e.g., Clement, 1982; Halloun &