Abstract:

What is rationality and what comprises rational behavior of humans is in the center of heated debate in judgment and decision making literature. Recently, Stanovich (2011) proposed a new tripartite model of human mind with an emphasis on “reflective mind” – our ability to reflect our goals and motives, which enables us to decide, when to act upon “intuition” and when it is necessary to question our first impulses and base a decision on reflective deliberation. However, people differ not only in their abilities to use reflection, but also in their motivation for such rational behavior. Master Rationality Motive Scale (MRMS) proposed by Stanovich (2011) measures the construct of rational motivation (felt need for rational integration).

In recent study we used MRMS to assess rational motivation of future teachers with two preliminary goals:
(1) to adapt MRMS for use in Slovak research and education and verify its psychometric properties
(2) to explore the construct of rational motivation among future teachers.

393 students (87.9% women, mean age 19.83, SD=2.9) of Pedagogical faculty with various specializations filled in the MRMS, which consists of 15 items. MRMS is supposed to tap an individual characteristic different from cognitive ability (intelligence) and should capture unique variance in rational thinking. The results indeed showed that MRMS has quite low internal consistency (Cronbach´s alpha = 0.637) and measures at least two major factors, although factor loadings reflect rather artefact of formulations and not underlying differences (majority of reverse-coded items loaded into one factor and the rest loaded to the other factor).

Future teachers did not show substantial inclination to rational thinking, as reflected by the middle range scores. We also did not find any significant differences in rational motivation between men and women.

There are several implications following from our preliminary analysis of MRMS. Firstly, it is clear that MRMS needs further refinement, such as examining different formulations, addition and/or deletion of some items, etc. before we can proceed to further logical step: to determine its construct validity with other measures and its predictive validity for real life outcomes. However, aside from these psychometric difficulties, it nevertheless point to the need of assessment of motivation to rationality. As we can see from the preliminary results, majority of future teachers are not too much inclined to use the rational thinking, which is rather disturbing. On the other hand, rationality – similar with intelligence – consists of two dimensions. Fluid rationality, as proposed by Stanovich (2011), reflect thinking abilities and crystallized rationality comprises of thinking dispositions (such as motivation to rational thinking) and learned algorithms for correct solutions of problems (such as probabilistic reasoning and scientific thinking). This part of rationality should be addressed in education (not only) of future teachers and in the paper we propose several ways how to approach this issue.

Keywords:

Rationality, education, Master Rationality Motive Scale, tripartite model.