Stocks and flows are basis of dynamics. Understanding of stock and flow is crucial in comprehending and managing problems such as global warming and national debt. Yet previous experimental studies have found that people perform poorly in simple stock-flow tasks. However, many do have a notion of accumulation in terms of calculating running total, adding or subtracting items to keep track of a running tally. Here a pre-test-treatment-post-test experiment was designed to test the hypothesis that people’s understanding of stock and flow behaviours will improve after being asked to reflect on a cognitive conflict, generated by utilizing their running total calculation. Comparisons with a conventional approach to teach stock and flow dynamics and without teaching were also done. Results show that improvements were not significant; the hypothesis lacks support. On the other hand, the conventional approach produced significant improvement. Possible explanations of the results and their implications for education on dynamics, communication of complex dynamic problems and policy insights are discussed.

This is the whole item.

Date created

• 2010 July 25-2010 July 29

Type

• Document

Processing Activity

• Processing documentation available at: https://wiki.albany.edu/display/SCA/Processing+Ingested+Digital+Files

License

• Creative Commons BY-NC-ND Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International

  
  Contact Us for questions or additional rights.

ITEM CONTEXT

Part of

17bfad39e1d09bfe17f82d7ae001449f

Scope and Contents

Part of

23d738ba88f8333bc39725f9cb5bd0b8

Scope and Contents

Part of

516b485dacfb3c26da448243f0948912

Scope and Contents

Collection

System Dynamic Society Records

Scope and Contents

Collecting area

• This collection is part of the University Archives