Jordan Hatch and Jamie L. Jensen, PhD, Department of Biology
The purpose of our project was to understand if hypothetical deductive (HD) reasoning skills exist in each discipline and if so, whether they are transferable between disciplines. HD reasoning is the method of scientific investigation used most commonly by scientists. It includes formulating hypotheses, devising experiments, making predictions, and analyzing results (iSTAR 2013). Many science classes boast scientific reasoning as a main learning outcome, but does reasoning transfer between disciplines and thus benefit the person as a whole? We hypothesized that most, if not all, disciplines use HD reasoning. In addition, we hypothesized that because this skill is context independent (i.e., a procedural skill), it is transferable between disciplines. If HD reasoning transfers between disciplines, then our focus on this skill in introductory courses (especially GE courses) has the potential to benefit students in their own fields. Thus, our goal was to determine the transferability of HD reasoning in order to inform our curricular decisions.
To determine if HD reasoning is used in other disciplines, we contacted 112 experts from twenty disciplines. We selected our experts from the faculty at BYU from the following disciplines: Archeology, Art, Business, Communication, Dance, Economics, Education, Engineering, English, Geography, History, Life Science, Math, Music, Philosophy, Physical Science, Psychology, Sociology, Statistics, and Religion. We received 24 responses agreeing to participate; nobody from Math or Dance agreed to participate. We sent a questionnaire to our 24 participants explaining HD reasoning and asking them to respond to three survey questions:
- Do you use HD reasoning to complete the tasks of your discipline? If so, how?
- Please describe how your HD reasoning process is similar and/or different from the one we described. Can you give an example from your own research?
- How do you (or how could you) evaluate this reasoning ability in your students? Please give two examples of questions that you could ask on a test to evaluate the strength or presence of this ability in your students.
Seventeen of our experts have responded, and we are awaiting the responses from the remaining seven. The seventeen experts were able to answer the first two questions but had difficulty responding to the third question. Our plan was to use the responses from question three to create a questionnaire with context independent assessment items that we could use to test the transferability of HD reasoning. Because many of the experts do not formally test this ability in their students, we created an HD reasoning inventory with seventeen HD reasoning items that can be answered without previous content knowledge. We administered the HD reasoning inventory to 80 Bio 100 students and ran a reliability analysis on it using the SPSS statistical package. We will then send the inventory to our 24 experts and analyze their responses using ANOVA to see whether HD reasoning is a transferable skill.
The seventeen experts who responded to our questionnaire represent twelve disciplines: Archeology, Business, Communications, Economics, Education, Engineering, English, Geography, History, Life Sciences, Philosophy, and Sociology. Every disciplinary expert, with the possible exception of Economics, indicated that they use HD reasoning. The response from the Economics expert indicated that his use of HD reasoning was dependent on how devising experiments is defined. Devising experiments includes any methodology used to find support for a hypothesis, including statistical analyses. We therefore find support for Economics being a discipline that uses HD reasoning.
We received various responses to the third question in our survey. None of our experts formally test for HD reasoning skills in their students. Instead they test for HD reasoning indirectly through research, reflective practice, design problems, essays, or essay questions. Students must use HD reasoning to solve problems presented in these methods. As an alternative to coming up with exam questions, we asked experts to send us academic articles that they had published or had read recently in which the author used HD reasoning. We were able to observe the HD reasoning pattern in the articles and abstract HD reasoning questions from them, but making the questions context independent proved difficult and time consuming because many of the articles were highly complicated and specialized. Thus, we designed our own HD reasoning inventory based on previous published questions as well as a few from experts that we did receive.
We administered the HD reasoning inventory to 80 Bio 100 students and ran a reliability analysis on it using the SPSS statistical package. The Cronbach’s alpha was .539. This is rather low and indicates that more work needs to be done in the design of this instrument. One issue is that the test appeared to be too easy. The average score (by non-majors students) on the test was 76%. On a third of the items, students scored on average above a 90%. Thus, it seems that we need to increase the difficulty of the items in order to increase our discrimination power. We will modify our instrument for better reliability, and send it to our 24 experts. As we await responses to our HD reasoning inventory, we predict that HD reasoning will reveal itself to be transferable between disciplines. This will be evidenced by equal scores on the test by the various disciplinary experts. We found support for this prediction as we read scholarly articles from other disciplines and used them to created HD reasoning questions.
Preliminarily, our research supports the idea that HD reasoning is used in every discipline. Our research also found support for HD reasoning being transferable between disciplines. As we finish our research, we expect to find further support for our hypotheses. Because we found support for HD reasoning transferring between disciplines, then our focus on this skill in introductory courses (especially GE courses) has the potential to benefit students in their own fields. Several researchers have attempted to explicitly teach reasoning skills with good success (Abd-El-Khalick & Lederman, 2000; Khishfe & Abd-El-Khalick, 2002; Kim et al., 2014; Ross, 1988). Because reasoning ability is teachable and is used in the diverse disciplines we examined, HD reasoning should be an integral part of introductory college curriculum.
Works Cited
Abd-El-Khalick, F., & Lederman, N. G. (2000). Improving science teachers’ conceptions of nature of science: a critical review of the literature. International Journal of Science Education, 22(7), 665-701. iSTAR (2013).
iSTAR Assessment. Hypothetical-deductive reasoning. Retrieved October 29, 2013 from http://www.istarassessment.org/srdims/hypothetical-deductive-reasoningneeds- pictures/
Khishfe, R., & Abd-El-Khalick, F. (2002). Influence of explicit and reflective versus implicit inquiry-oriented instruction on sixth graders’ views of nature of science. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 39, 551-578.
Kim, K. H., VanTassel-Baska, J., Bracken, B. A., Feng, A., Stambaugh, T. (2014). Assessing science reasoning and conceptual understanding in the primary grades using standardized and performance-based assessments. Journal of Advanced Academics, 25(1), 47–66. doi: 10.1177/1932202X14520946
Ross, J. A., Cousins, J. B. (1993). Patterns of student growth in reasoning about correlational problems. Journal of Educational Psychology, 85(1), 49-65.