Abstract for:Mathematical knowledge is related to Stock-Flow task performance and the use of correlation heuristic for highly educated Chinese participants

There is growing evidence that poor system thinking skills drag down peoples’ ability to understand accumulation and rates of change, which is termed as the stock-flow (SF) failure. People tend to use incorrect representation (correlation heuristic) to think about SF structure. A variety of SF tasks have been used and plenty of factors have been tested in previous experiments, but people’s understanding of accumulation rarely improves. In a previous study(Qi & Gonzalez, 2015), it shows that mathematical knowledge is related to people’s SF performance. To investigate mathematical knowledge’s role in Chinese highly educated participants’ SF performance and their use of correlation heuristic, an experiment was conducted by using Mathematics test(Qi & Gonzalez, 2015) and body fluids version(Brunstein, Gonzalez, & Kanter, 2010) of the Department Store task(Sterman, 2002). The results show that Chinese highly educated participants have a better performance in general (80% success rate in both Q3 and Q4), and Mathematics test score is positively related to their task performance, and negatively related to their use of correlation heuristic when they could not response correctly. The contribution and limitation of current research, and further research are briefly discussed.