Abstract:

Logical thinking is an integral part of the skills needed to solve problems in everyday life. As a part of mathematical logic, propositional logic forms the basic apparatus for logical reasoning that can fundamentally support thinking in general. The current study presents the results of empirical research, which focused on investigating how university students perform and evaluate the difficulty of test tasks from the point of view of the different fields of study specialization. This study presents results (N=1429) of empirical research based on one single-group quasi-experiment with the students of selected universities from Slovakia, Hungary and Romania. We compared the results of 500 students in pedagogy studies and 929 other university students whose studies do not relate to pedagogy in the knowledge test and the assessment of the difficulty of the tasks. The research instrument used was an online knowledge test containing tasks from the selected elements of propositional logic. In the practical part of the work, a test with 15 tasks was used to understand and correct quantification, negation of statements and formulation of inferences. The analysis results show significant differences. Students whose studies do not relate to pedagogy achieved significantly better results (Mann-Whitney U=209011.5, p = 0.002) in the average total score. Investigating the relationship between the student’s score and rating the task´s difficulty, we found a significant correlation with Spearman correlation -0.337 (p < 0.001), i.e. the strength of this relation has a weak-medium value. Pedagogical studies students evaluated the tasks of the test with a higher score, meaning that the tasks seemed to them to be more difficult than students of non-pedagogical fields.

Keywords:

Propositional logic, knowledge evaluation, tasks rating, fields of study, higher education.