ABSTRACT
Visual displays, such as icon arrays and risk ladders, are often used to communicate numerical health information. Number lines improve reasoning with rational numbers but are seldom used in health contexts. College students solved ratio problems related to COVID-19 (e.g., number of deaths and number of cases) in one of four randomly assigned conditions: icon arrays, risk ladders, number lines, or no accompanying visual display. As predicted, number lines facilitated performance on these problems-the number line condition outperformed the other visual display conditions, which did not perform any better than the no visual display condition. In addition, higher performance on the health-related ratio problems was associated with higher COVID-19 worry for oneself and others, higher perceptions of COVID-19 severity, and higher endorsement of intentions to engage in preventive health behaviors, even when controlling for baseline math skills. These findings have important implications for effectively presenting health statistics. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).
ABSTRACT
The advent of COVID-19 highlighted widespread misconceptions regarding people's accuracy in interpreting quantitative health information. How do people judge whether they accurately answered health-related math problems? Which individual differences predict these item-by-item metacognitive monitoring judgments? How does a brief intervention targeting math skills-which increased problem-solving accuracy-affect people's monitoring judgments? We investigated these pre-registered questions in a secondary analysis of data from a large Qualtrics panel of adults (N = 1,297). Pretest performance accuracy, math self-efficacy, gender, and math anxiety were associated with pretest item-level monitoring judgments. Participants randomly assigned to the intervention condition, relative to the control condition, made higher monitoring judgments post intervention. That is, these participants believed they were more accurate when answering problems. Regardless of experimental condition, those who actually were correct on health-related math problems made higher monitoring judgments than those who answered incorrectly. Finally, consistent with prior research, math anxiety explained additional variance in monitoring judgments beyond trait anxiety. Together, findings indicated the importance of considering both objective (e.g., problem accuracy) and subjective factors (e.g., math self-efficacy, math anxiety) to better understand adults' metacognitive monitoring. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11409-022-09300-3.
ABSTRACT
At the onset of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) global pandemic, our interdisciplinary team hypothesized that a mathematical misconception-whole number bias (WNB)-contributed to beliefs that COVID-19 was less fatal than the flu. We created a brief online educational intervention for adults, leveraging evidence-based cognitive science research, to promote accurate understanding of rational numbers related to COVID-19. Participants from a Qualtrics panel (N = 1,297; 75% White) were randomly assigned to an intervention or control condition, solved health-related math problems, and subsequently completed 10 days of daily diaries in which health cognitions and affect were assessed. Participants who engaged with the intervention, relative to those in the control condition, were more accurate and less likely to explicitly mention WNB errors in their strategy reports as they solved COVID-19-related math problems. Math anxiety was positively associated with risk perceptions, worry, and negative affect immediately after the intervention and across the daily diaries. These results extend the benefits of worked examples in a practically relevant domain. Ameliorating WNB errors could not only help people think more accurately about COVID-19 statistics expressed as rational numbers, but also about novel future health crises, or any other context that involves information expressed as rational numbers. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).