This article considers the epistemological chain in adventure sports coaching through personal experiences of undergraduate adventure students using semi-structured interviews and qualitative thematic analysis. Findings showed many observable practices utilised by adventure sport coaches were epistemologically sophisticated. This included…

Contemporary theories of decision-making are compared with respect to their predictions about the judgments that are hypothesized to underlie risky choice framing effects. Specifically, we compare predictions of psychophysical models, such as prospect theory, to the cognitive representational approach of fuzzy-trace theory in which the presence or…

The historical tendency to view medicine as both an art and a science may have contributed to a disinclination among clinicians towards cognitive science. In particular, this has had an impact on the approach towards the diagnostic process which is a barometer of clinical decision-making behaviour and is increasingly seen as a yardstick of…

Socioscientific issues (SSIs), or controversial scientific issues with social implications, influence members of society regardless of demographic. SSIs are contentious and ill-structured, meaning they do not have a definitive answer. To properly equip students with the tools needed to handle SSIs, undergraduate science curricula emphasize…

The purpose of the study was to identify how debates effected the analytical thinking abilities of tertiary students and how the debates as an instructional approach were perceived by the students. The study used quantitative data collection methods such as tests and observation checklists and qualitative data collection methods such as a focus…

Managerial accounting teaches students to make rational decisions by evaluating sunk costs, incremental costs, and opportunity costs. The behavioral literature suggests that biases and heuristics overcome rational thinking. The authors explore whether learning cost concepts attenuates behavioral biases. They find a statistically significant…

When asked to determine whether a syllogistic argument is deductively valid, people are influenced by their prior beliefs about the believability of the conclusion. Recently, two competing explanations for this belief bias effect have been proposed, each based on signal detection theory (SDT). Under a response bias explanation, people set more…

A common practice amongst scientists is to evaluate the connections between evidence and claims about natural and human-induced phenomena. Teacher education coursework may improve understanding of this important activity and facilitate teachers to implement evidential thinking approaches into their future science teaching. Instructional scaffolds…

While portfolios are increasingly used to assess competence, the validity of such portfolio-based assessments has hitherto remained unconfirmed. The purpose of the present research is therefore to further our understanding of how assessors form judgments when interpreting the complex data included in a competency-based portfolio. Eighteen…

The task of turning undergrads into academics requires teaching them to reason about the world in a more complex way. We present the Argument Complexity Scale, a tool for analysing the complexity of argumentation, based on the Integrative Complexity and Conceptual Complexity Scales from, respectively, political psychology and personality theory.…

We examined how decision makers generate and evaluate hypotheses when data are presented sequentially. In the first 2 experiments, participants learned the relationship between data and possible causes of the data in a virtual environment. Data were then presented iteratively, and participants either generated hypotheses they thought caused the…

A widely held assumption in metamemory is that better, more accurate metamemory monitoring leads to better, more efficacious restudy decisions, reflected in better memory performance--we refer to this causal chain as the "restudy selectivity hypothesis". In 3 sets of experiments, we tested this hypothesis by factorially manipulating…

Individuals' memory experiences typically covary with those of others' around them, and on average, an item is more likely to be familiar if a companion recommends it as such. Although it would be ideal if observers could use the external recommendations of others' as statistical priors during recognition decisions, it is currently unclear how or…

Why, during a decision between new alternatives, do people bias their evaluations of information to support a tentatively preferred option? The authors test the following 3 decision process goals as the potential drivers of such distortion of information: (a) to reduce the effort of evaluating new information, (b) to increase the separation…

Which matters more--beliefs about absolute ability or ability relative to others? This study set out to compare the effects of such beliefs on satisfaction with performance, self-evaluations, and bets on future performance. In Experiment 1, undergraduate participants were told they had answered 20% correct, 80% correct, or were not given their…