Tancoš Martin, Chvojka Edita, Jabůrek Michal, Portešová Šárka
Psychology Research Institute, Faculty of Social Studies, Masaryk University, 602 00 Brno, Czech Republic.
Departments of Methodology and Statistics and Interdisciplinary Social Science, Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences, University of Utrecht, 3584 CH Utrecht, The Netherlands.
J Intell. 2023 Mar 29;11(4):63. doi: 10.3390/jintelligence11040063.
The stereotype that children who are more able solve tasks quicker than their less capable peers exists both in and outside education. The F > C phenomenon and the distance-difficulty hypothesis offer alternative explanations of the time needed to complete a task; the former by the response correctness and the latter by the relative difference between the difficulty of the task and the ability of the examinee. To test these alternative explanations, we extracted IRT-based ability estimates and task difficulties from a sample of 514 children, 53% girls, M(age) = 10.3 years; who answered 29 Piagetian balance beam tasks. We used the answer correctness and task difficulty as predictors in multilevel regression models when controlling for children's ability levels. Our results challenge the 'faster equals smarter' stereotype. We show that ability levels predict the time needed to solve a task when the task is solved incorrectly, though only with moderately and highly difficult items. Moreover, children with higher ability levels take longer to answer items incorrectly, and tasks equal to children's ability levels take more time than very easy or difficult tasks. We conclude that the relationship between ability, task difficulty, and answer correctness is complex, and warn education professionals against basing their professional judgment on students' quickness.
在教育领域内外，都存在一种刻板印象，即能力较强的孩子比能力较弱的同龄人解决任务的速度更快。F > C现象和距离-难度假设为完成一项任务所需的时间提供了不同的解释；前者基于回答的正确性，后者基于任务难度与考生能力之间的相对差异。为了检验这些不同的解释，我们从514名儿童的样本中提取了基于项目反应理论（IRT）的能力估计值和任务难度，其中女孩占53%，平均年龄（M(age)）为10.3岁；这些儿童回答了29项皮亚杰平衡木任务。在控制儿童能力水平时，我们将回答的正确性和任务难度作为多层回归模型中的预测变量。我们的研究结果挑战了“更快等于更聪明”的刻板印象。我们发现，当任务回答错误时，能力水平会预测解决任务所需的时间，不过仅适用于中等难度和高难度的项目。此外，能力水平较高的儿童回答错误项目所需的时间更长，与儿童能力水平相当的任务比非常简单或非常困难的任务需要更多时间。我们得出结论，能力、任务难度和回答正确性之间的关系很复杂，并警告教育专业人员不要基于学生的反应速度做出专业判断。
