TY - JOUR
T1 - Math Matters
T2 - A Novel, Brief Educational Intervention Decreases Whole Number Bias When Reasoning About COVID-19
AU - Thompson, Clarissa A.
AU - Taber, Jennifer M.
AU - Sidney, Pooja G.
AU - Fitzsimmons, Charles J.
AU - Mielicki, Marta K.
AU - Matthews, Percival G.
AU - Schemmel, Erika A.
AU - Simonovic, Nicolle
AU - Foust, Jeremy L.
AU - Aurora, Pallavi
AU - Disabato, David J.
AU - Seah, T. H.Stanley
AU - Schiller, Lauren K.
AU - Coifman, Karin G.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 American Psychological Association
PY - 2021
Y1 - 2021
N2 - At the onset of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) global pandemic, our interdisciplinary team hypothesized that a mathematical misconception—whole number bias (WNB)—contributed to beliefs that COVID-19 was less fatal than the flu. We created a brief online educational intervention for adults, leveraging evidence-based cognitive science research, to promote accurate understanding of rational numbers related to COVID-19. Participants from aQualtrics panel (N=1,297; 75%White)were randomly assigned to an intervention or control condition, solved health-related math problems, and subsequently completed 10 days of daily diaries in which health cognitions and affect were assessed. Participantswho engagedwith the intervention, relative to those in the control condition, were more accurate and less likely to explicitly mentionWNB errors in their strategy reports as they solved COVID-19-related math problems. Math anxiety was positively associated with risk perceptions, worry, and negative affect immediately after the intervention and across the daily diaries. These results extend the benefits of worked examples in a practically relevant domain. Ameliorating WNB errors could not only help people think more accurately about COVID-19 statistics expressed as rational numbers, but also about novel future health crises, or any other context that involves information expressed as rational numbers.
AB - At the onset of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) global pandemic, our interdisciplinary team hypothesized that a mathematical misconception—whole number bias (WNB)—contributed to beliefs that COVID-19 was less fatal than the flu. We created a brief online educational intervention for adults, leveraging evidence-based cognitive science research, to promote accurate understanding of rational numbers related to COVID-19. Participants from aQualtrics panel (N=1,297; 75%White)were randomly assigned to an intervention or control condition, solved health-related math problems, and subsequently completed 10 days of daily diaries in which health cognitions and affect were assessed. Participantswho engagedwith the intervention, relative to those in the control condition, were more accurate and less likely to explicitly mentionWNB errors in their strategy reports as they solved COVID-19-related math problems. Math anxiety was positively associated with risk perceptions, worry, and negative affect immediately after the intervention and across the daily diaries. These results extend the benefits of worked examples in a practically relevant domain. Ameliorating WNB errors could not only help people think more accurately about COVID-19 statistics expressed as rational numbers, but also about novel future health crises, or any other context that involves information expressed as rational numbers.
KW - COVID-19
KW - learning
KW - magnitude understanding
KW - whole number bias
KW - worked example
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85123747157&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85123747157&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1037/xap0000403
DO - 10.1037/xap0000403
M3 - Article
C2 - 35073129
AN - SCOPUS:85123747157
SN - 1076-898X
VL - 27
SP - 632
EP - 656
JO - Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied
JF - Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied
IS - 4
ER -