CAUSALITY IN ANALOGIES GENERATED BY EXPERT AND NOVICE GEOSCIENTISTS

Surveys were collected at a 2009 meeting of a professional geoscience society and as a pre-assessment to an introductory geoscience course to evaluate the relationship between expertise and the types of analogies that geoscientists generate. Participants at the geoscience meeting included 47 expert geologists, those holding geoscience doctorate degrees, and 108 novice geologists, those with less than master’s degree-level training. Participants from the introductory course included 240 novice non-geologists. The cohorts were asked to generate an analogy to a balloon floating and to degassing CO2 from the oceans. For the balloon analogy, responses were coded as belonging to one of four categories, three kinds of causal analogies and one non-causal category. There three kinds of causal analogies are: correct causal, incorrect causal, and social causal, which refer to the event being caused by a human action. For the degassing analogy, responses were coded as belonging to one of 3 categories (social causal did not apply).

As expertise increased, so did the rate of producing causal analogies. For these analyses, 2 (education level) x 2 (correct causal vs. non-causal) χ² tests of independence were conducted. Expert participants produced more correct causal analogies than all novice participants. For the geoscientist surveys, participants were either given general instructions to generate an analogy or explicit instructions with an example of a causal and non-causal analogy. Expert and novice geologists produced more correct causal analogies than the non-geologists when given explicit instructions in balloon task (PhD: χ² (1) = 23.81, p < .01; Below MA: χ² (1) = 13.6, p < .01). We infer this effect to be caused by the prominence of causal explanations in developing scientific expertise. As experts gain causal knowledge, they begin to organize concepts and knowledge based on causal relationships.