Integrating psychometric and computational approaches to individual differences in multimodal reasoning

Psychometric measures of ability are unsuited to computational descriptions of tasks, primarily because they cannot take process into account. Studies of aptitude–treatment interactions have often failed to replicate from task to task precisely because of this difficulty. The current study aligns psychometric measures with process accounts in the domain of multimodal reasoning. Learning from multimodal logic courses transfers to other reasoning tasks, and this transfer has been found to relate to differences in strategic use of graphical representations in proof construction. The current study is a replication and an extension of these findings. Different goal types are distinguished in terms of: their modality; whether they involve proofs of consequence or non-consequence; and whether they can be solved by constructing single or multiple cases. We report on the interaction of a range of psychometric measures,
and the ways in which they relate to the development and deployment of strategies. In particular, students who develop coping strategies to overcome difficulties with certain problems find that these strategies arise at the expense of appropriate use of a variety of strategies. Our approach, which characterises goals in terms of their logical as well as phenomenal properties, supports a computational perspective on psychometric measures in reasoning tasks.