Most Undergraduate Exercise Physiology Courses Favor Teleological Reasoning: How Prior Coursework Can Influence Education
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Abstract
Among many students, physiology is known as a tough field, leading to more students dropping out and failing the course. The subject’s structure, methods used for instruction and ways students process and understand physiology are among the reasons it is hard to master this field. A question that is still unclear is how students in exercise physiology reason about causes versus outcomes. This work intended to discover: 1) whether students mainly relate cardiorespiratory exercise changes through purpose- or science-based thinking and 2) whether prior study of physiology increases one way of thinking more than the other. Nine incomplete statements about exercise physiology were added to an online questionnaire as part of the analysis. Every participant was given the option to answer using a teleological or mechanistic explanation for each of the examples. Students in the study all belonged to one of three groups: Movement Sciences (152), Health-related fields (81) or Other (64). Students in these first two categories were also differentiated according to whether they had prior experience in a physiology class. Across the different groups, teleological explanation was common in 58% of all responses. Students not majoring in health fields showed much higher rates of teleological thinking (76 ± 16%) compared to Movement Sciences students (61 ± 25%) and those in Health (58 ± 26%) (P < 0.01). Students who had learned physiology courses in their background explained phenomena much less often using teleology (59 ± 25%) than students who had not learned these courses (72 ± 22%) (P < 0.01). Still, most of the students, even those with previous physiology instruction, relied mostly on teleological thinking. Generally, undergraduate students use outcome-based reasoning when considering the body’s responses during physical activity. While prior learning in physiology can decrease a tendency to think this way, it is not always completely removed. Results suggest teleological thinking might persist no matter how much formal instruction is given in the subject.
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References
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