Qi, Liang with Cleotilde Gonzalez "Mathematical knowledge is related to Stock-Flow task performance and the use of correlation heuristic for highly educated Chinese participants", 2018 August 7 - 2018 August 9
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Fullscreen& THE 36™ INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE OF THE SYSTEM DYNAMICS SOCIETY REYKJAVIK, ICELAND Mathematical knowledge is related to Stock-Flow task performance and the use of correlation heuristic for highly educated Chinese participants Liang (Eric) Qi, Naval Medical University Cleotilde (Coty) Gonzalez, Carnegie Mellon University 0:00- & Problem Statement * Accurate perception of system dynamics is essential for solving daily life problems: - keep a healthy body weight - manage personal finance - fill a bathtub * BUT, many people fail to do due to: - Stock-Flow (SF) failure - correlation heuristic ° To reveal the factors - education system background - mathematical knowledge 0:30- Susien N . . ® Approach or Dynamic Hypothesis * Hypotheses - Highly educated students in China will do better - Ones with more mathematical knowledge * will do better in SF tasks * will be less likely to use correlation heuristic * Method - 213 STEM students + web-based survey - Mathematics test (Qi & Gonzalez, 2015) - Fluids task (Brunstein et al., 2010) based on Department Store task (Sterman, 2002) 2:00- & Progress and Insights to Share —— ¢ Results - Chinese STEM education system works * Q3 & Q4 accuracy: - 81% & 80% in China - 42% & 30% in U.S. (Sterman, 2002) - Mathematical knowledge matters ¢ Better math, less SF failure & correlation heuristic - Both logistic regression models p<0.05 * In the future, we need more studies involving... - non-western educational and cultural environments - formal analysis to compare diverse samples 3:30-
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- There is growing evidence that poor system thinking skills drag down peoples’ ability to understand accumulation and rates of change, which is termed as the stock-flow (SF) failure. People tend to use incorrect representation (correlation heuristic) to think about SF structure. A variety of SF tasks have been used and plenty of factors have been tested in previous experiments, but people’s understanding of accumulation rarely improves. In a previous study(Qi Gonzalez, 2015), it shows that mathematical knowledge is related to people’s SF performance. To investigate mathematical knowledge’s role in Chinese highly educated participants’ SF performance and their use of correlation heuristic, an experiment was conducted by using Mathematics test(Qi Gonzalez, 2015) and body fluids version(Brunstein, Gonzalez, Kanter, 2010) of the Department Store task(Sterman, 2002). The results show that Chinese highly educated participants have a better performance in general (80% success rate in both Q3 and Q4), and Mathematics test score is positively related to their task performance, and negatively related to their use of correlation heuristic when they could not response correctly. The contribution and limitation of current research, and further research are briefly discussed.
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- March 10, 2026
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