Bathtub Dynamics Revisited: An Examination of Déformation Professionelle in Higher Education

Abstract

It is assumed that more education leads to better understanding of complex systems. Some researchers, 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. 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 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 may lose the capability of dealing with simple SF tasks. We thus find hints on déformation professionelle in higher education. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The dual‐process theory and understanding of stocks and flows

“…One potential reason for this variation might be the differences in participants' educational backgrounds. It is shown that engineering students are more likely to understand accumulation than management students (Kapmeier et al, 2016). Further research is required to better understand the effect of demographic variables on people's understanding of accumulation.…”

‘Behavioural System Dynamics’: A Very Tentative and Slightly Sceptical Map of the Territory

“…In fact, we know that our tendency to ignore nonlinear relationships and to imagine that relationships are directly functional rather than involving accumulation also play a role (Forrester, ). Indeed, the latter gives rise to arguably the most active ‘pre‐existing’ areas of BehSD, the interest in the problems humans have understanding systems involving stocks (Sterman and Booth Sweeney, ; Ritchie‐Dunham and Puente, ; Cronin et al ., ; Abdel‐Hamid et al ., ; Stouten and Groessler, ; Kapmeier et al ., ).…”

Math matters: mathematical knowledge plays an essential role in Chinese undergraduates' stock‐and‐flow task performance

“…The Department Store (DS) task (Sterman, ) is one of the most widely used stock‐and‐flow tasks (Figure ). Undergraduate and graduate students in esteemed universities perform poorly in stock‐and‐flow tasks (Sterman, ; Cronin and Gonzalez, ; Cronin et al ., ; Brunstein et al ., ; Gonzalez and Wong, ; Kapmeier et al ., ). Such difficulties are termed stock–flow (SF) failure (Cronin et al ., ).…”