Global-local processing impacts academic risk taking

ABSTRACT

Research has shown that academic risk taking—the selection of school tasks with varying difficulty levels—affords important implications for educational outcomes. In two experiments, we explored the role of cognitive processes—specifically, global versus local processing styles—in students’ academic risk-taking tendencies. Participants first read a short passage, which provided the context for their subsequent academic risk-taking decisions. Following which, participants undertook the Navon’s task and attended to either global letters or local letters only, i.e., were either globally or locally primed. The effects of priming on academic risk taking were then assessed using a perception-based measure (Experiment 1) and a task-based measure (Experiment 2). Experiment 1 provided preliminary evidence, which Experiment 2 confirmed, that globally focused individuals took more academic risk than did locally focused individuals after controlling for participants’ need for cognition (how much they enjoy effortful cognitive activities). Additionally, the inclusion of and comparisons with a control group in Experiment 2 revealed that locally focused participants drove the observed effects. The theory of predictive and reactive control systems (PARCS) provides a cogent account of our findings. Future directions and practical applications in education are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Academic risk taking
• Global-local processing
• Navon’s task
• Need for cognition (NFC)
• Theory of predictive and reactive control systems (PARCS)

Acknowledgments

We thank Alexander Yuen for providing the initial experimental materials, as well as Ranjith Vijayakumar for valuable suggestions with regard to data analysis.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Following Tops et al. (2010, 2014), we wish to emphasize that the two distinct control systems are not organized around the concepts “predictive” or “reactive”. Rather, the terms “predictive” and “reactive” are used as labels for functional systems that are organized, really, on the basis of their controlling behaviours that are adaptive under different circumstances.

2. Individuals who remembered more information from the text may, as a result of greater confidence or familiarity, take more academic risk. We wanted to rule out this possibility.

3. Influential outliers were identified based on Cook's distance, with a recommended cutoff value of 4/N = 0.058. We wish to refer readers to the Supplemental Material for more specific details of the outlier diagnostics.

4. Validation data was not collected from participants assigned to either the global or local condition because their ART scores, under the influence of priming, would likely not constitute “true” scores.

5. Here, we applied the same outlier exclusion criteria as those used in Experiment 1. We did not, however, exclude any outliers eventually, as the conclusions before and after exclusion remained the same. We thus reported the results of the complete dataset.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a National University of Singapore Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Heads and Deanery Research Support Scheme grant [grant number R-581-000-192-101] awarded to LimSWH.