Bathtub dynamics revisited : does educational background matter?

Prior studies ascribed people’s poor performance in dealing with basic systems concepts to different causes. While results indicate that, among other things, domain specific experience and familiarity with the problem context play a role in this stock-flow-(SF-)performance, this has not yet been fully clarified. In this article, we present an experiment that examines the role of educational background in SF-performance. We hypothesize that SF-performance increases when the problem context is embedded in the problem solver’s knowledge domain, indicated by educational background. Using the square wave pattern and the sawtooth pattern tasks from the initial study by Booth Sweeney and Sterman (2000), we design two additional cover stories for the former, the Vehicle story from the engineering domain and the Application story from the business domain, next to the original Bathtub story. We then test the three sets of questions on business students. Results mainly support our hypothesis. Interestingly, participants even do better on a more complex behavioral pattern from their knowledge domain than on a simpler pattern from more distant domains. Although these findings have to be confirmed by further studies, they contribute both to the methodology of future surveys and the context familiarity discussion

Bathtub dynamics revisited : exploring the engineering domain

SF-failure, the inability of people to correctly determine the behavior of simple stock and flow structures is subject of a long research stream. Reasons for SF-failure can be attributed to different reasons, one of them being lacking domain specific experience, thus familiarity with the problem context. In this article we present a continuation of an experiment to examine the role of educational background in SF-performance. We base the question set on the Bathtub Dynamics tasks introduced by Booth Sweeney and Sterman (2000) and vary the cover stories. In this paper we describe how we developed and tested a new cover story for the engineering domain and implemented the recommendations from a prior study. We test three sets of questions with engineering students which enables us to compare the results to a previous study in which we tested the questions with business students. Results mainly support our hypothesis that context familiarity increases SF-performance. With our findings we further develop the methodology of the research on SF-failure

Bathtub dynamics revisited: disclosing traces of déformation professionelle in higher education : version 1.0

It is assumed that more education leads to better understanding of complex systems. Some researchers claim, however, find indications that simple mechanisms like stocks and flows are not well understood even by people who have passed higher education. In this paper, we test people’s understanding of complex systems with the widely studied stock-and-flow (SF) tasks (Booth Sweeney and Sterman 2000). SF tasks assess people’s understanding of the interplay between stocks and flows. We investigate SF failure of domain experts and novices in different knowledge domains. In particular, we compare performance on the original study’s Bathtub task with the square wave pattern (Booth Sweeney and Sterman 2000) with two alternative cover stories from the engineering and business domains on different groups of business and engineering students from different semesters. Further, we show that, while engineering students perform better than business students, with progressing in higher education, students seem to lose the capability of dealing with simple SF tasks from domains other than their field. We thus find hints on déformation professionelle in higher education