Examining instructional impacts of Online Reasoning Chain Construction Assessments (ORCCA)

Even after research-based instruction, many students struggle to ground their qualitative reasoning in fundamental principles and definitions. Dual-process theories of reasoning (DPToR) offer a useful lens for understanding this challenge, positing that human cognition relies on both a fast, intuitive, heuristic process and a slower, more deliberate, analytic process. To make analytic reasoning more explicit and accessible, we are developing Online Reasoning Chain Construction Assessment (ORCCA) tools through an interdisciplinary, multi-institution collaboration. ORCCA tasks prompt students to construct explanations by selecting from a number of true statements about a given problem. They thereby potentially serve both as a research tool for uncovering students’ reasoning processes and as an instructional scaffold for developing those processes. In this talk, we explore how completing tasks in the ORCCA format can shape students’ subsequent reasoning, highlighting implications for cultivating more principled and reflective explanations.