Measuring Reasoning about Teaching for Graduate Admissions in Psychology and Related Disciplines

J Intell. 2017 Nov 7;5(4):34. doi: 10.3390/jintelligence5040034.

Abstract

Teaching- and teaching-evaluation skills are critically important to professional success in psychology and related disciplines. We explored the possibility of measuring reasoning-about-teaching skills as a supplementary measure for admissions in psychology and related behavioral-sciences disciplines. We tested 103 students for their reasoning about teaching and their reasoning about research, as well as for their cognitive- (abstract reasoning) and educational skills. We found that women performed better than men on our reasoning-about-teaching measure, and that factorially, our reasoning-about-teaching measure clustered with our reasoning-about-research measures but not with our measures of abstract cognitive reasoning and educational skills.

Keywords: fluid abilities; reasoning; reasoning about research; reasoning about teaching; successful intelligence.