The generality/specificity of expertise in scientific reasoning

Previous research on scientific reasoning has shown that it involves a diverse set of skills. Yet, little is known about generality or domain specificity of those skills, an important issue in theories of expertise and in attempts to automate scientific reasoning skills. We present a study designed to test what kinds of skills psychologists actually use in designing and interpreting experiments and contrast expertise within a particular research area with general expertise at designing and interpreting experiments. The results suggest that psychologists use many domain-general skills in their experimentation and that bright and motivated Carnegie Mellon undergraduates are missing many of these skills. We believe that these results have important implications for psychological and artificial intelligence models of expertise, as well as educational implications in the domain of science instruction.

[1]  Christian D. Schunn.  A goals/effort tradeoff theory of experiment space search , 1996 .

[2]  L. Schauble,et al.  Students' transition from an engineering model to a science model of experimentation , 1991 .

[3]  L. Schauble,et al.  Belief revision in children: the role of prior knowledge and strategies for generating evidence. , 1990, Journal of experimental child psychology.

[4]  J. E. Tschirgi,et al.  Sensible reasoning: A hypothesis about hypotheses. , 1980 .

[5]  J. Greeno.  Situations, mental models, and generative knowledge. , 1989 .

[6]  P. Wason.  On the Failure to Eliminate Hypotheses in a Conceptual Task , 1960 .

[7]  William J. Clancey,et al.  Situated Action: A Neuropsychologiwl Interpretation Response to Vera and Simon , 2005 .

[8]  Herbert A. Simon,et al.  Laboratory Replication of Scientific Discovery Processes , 1990, Cogn. Sci..

[9]  Kevin Dunbar,et al.  Concept Discovery in a Scientific Domain , 1993, Cogn. Sci..

[10]  Robert J. Crutcher,et al.  The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance. , 1993 .

[11]  John R. Anderson,et al.  The Transfer of Cognitive Skill , 1989 .

[12]  John H. Holland,et al.  Induction: Processes of Inference, Learning, and Discovery , 1987, IEEE Expert.

[13]  Christian D. Schunn,et al.  A 4-Space Model of Scientific Discovery , 1995 .

[14]  Ian I. Mitroff.  The Subjective Side of Science , 1969 .

[15]  K. A. Ericsson,et al.  Protocol analysis: Verbal reports as data, Rev. ed. , 1993 .

[16]  H. Simon,et al.  Recall of random and distorted chess positions: Implications for the theory of expertise , 1996, Memory & cognition.

[17]  R. Shiffrin,et al.  A retrieval model for both recognition and recall. , 1984, Psychological review.

[18]  W. Balzer,et al.  Scientific discovery, computational explorations of the creative processes , 1991 .

[19]  John R. Anderson,et al.  Reflections of the Environment in Memory Form of the Memory Functions , 2022 .

[20]  John R. Anderson.  The Adaptive Character of Thought , 1990 .

[21]  P. Johnson-Laird,et al.  Psychology of Reasoning: Structure and Content , 1972 .

[22]  J. Lave.  Cognition in Practice: Outdoors: a social anthropology of cognition in practice , 1988 .

[23]  Radl E. Vald.  Generic Tasks of Scientific Discovery , 1995 .

[24]  William M. Smith,et al.  A Study of Thinking , 1956 .

[25]  John R. Anderson,et al.  Rules of the Mind , 1993 .

[26]  G. Ryle,et al.  The concept of mind. , 2004, The International journal of psycho-analysis.

[27]  M. Chi,et al.  Network representation of a child's dinosaur knowledge. , 1983 .

[28]  Joseph P. Martino,et al.  The subjective side of science : Mitroff, Ian I., Elsevier Scientific Publishing Co., Amsterdam, 1974, 329 pp., $11.50 , 1976 .

[29]  Robert S. Cohen,et al.  On Scientific Discovery , 1981 .

[30]  Lucy Suchman.  Plans and situated actions: the problem of human-machine communication , 1987 .

[31]  D. Kuhn.  Children and adults as intuitive scientists. , 1989, Psychological review.

[32]  John R. Anderson.  Language, Memory, and Thought , 1976 .

[33]  P. Langley,et al.  Computational Models of Scientific Discovery and Theory Formation , 1990 .

[34]  Herbert A. Simon,et al.  THE MIND'S EYE IN CHESS , 1988 .

[35]  R. Shiffrin,et al.  Search of associative memory. , 1981 .

[36]  B. Adelson,et al.  The Role of Domain Expenence in Software Design , 1985, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.

[37]  David Klahr,et al.  Dual Space Search During Scientific Reasoning , 1988, Cogn. Sci..

[38]  L. Squire,et al.  Preserved learning and retention of pattern-analyzing skill in amnesia: dissociation of knowing how and knowing that. , 1980, Science.

[39]  Jan Maarten Schraagen,et al.  How Experts Solve a Novel Problem in Experimental Design , 1993, Cogn. Sci..

[40]  Herbert A. Simon,et al.  The Processes of Scientific Discovery: The Strategy of Experimentation , 1988, Cogn. Sci..

[41]  Alan H. Schoenfeld,et al.  Mathematical Problem Solving , 1985 .

[42]  Beth Adelson,et al.  Modeling Software Design Within a Problem-Space Architecture , 1989 .

[43]  C. Lebiere,et al.  The Atomic Components of Thought , 1998 .

[44]  D. Kuhn.  THE SKILLS OF ARGUMENT , 2008, Education for Thinking.

[45]  K. A. Ericsson,et al.  Protocol Analysis: Verbal Reports as Data , 1984 .

[46]  K. Dunbar.  HOW SCIENTISTS REALLY REASON: SCIENTIFIC REASONING IN REAL-WORLD LABORATORIES , 1995 .

[47]  T. Landauer.  Memory without organization: Properties of a model with random storage and undirected retrieval , 1975, Cognitive Psychology.

[48]  Clifford R. Mynatt,et al.  Confirmation Bias in a Simulated Research Environment: An Experimental Study of Scientific Inference , 1977 .