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Dear Tzur,

My interests are similar to yours.

> I will be grateful for any information concerning
> 2.. studies on cognitive aspects of deriving dynamics from
> static structures (besides Sterman&Sweeney)

I presented a poster at the Atlanta SD conference on an instrument I
developed called the Dynamic Forecasting Questionnaire. This was used with
approx. 500 participants drawn from school, first year uni, 3rd year
engineering and MBA populations. The target system was slightly more complex
than Booth-Sweeney & Sterman (2000) being a population with births and
deaths and two feedback loops. However, instead of having participants draw
their responses, I had them choose from list of multiple choice
alternatives. Participants were still very poor at picking the correct
dynamic behaviour. In one condition, where participants had the option of
choosing from graphs showing the stock moving in either direction, 39% of
engineering students chose the wrong direction!

I have not pursued this research further. With this approach it is very
difficult to isolate specifically what the problem is. I believe that in my
research at least, there was a problem associated with the use of the
bathtub metaphor (ie. understanding of the concept of births flowing in and
deaths flowing out of the stock). I was intending to follow up with tests
involving natural language without either graphs or SD representations to
see if performance was as bad but have not done so as yet.

I would be happy to supply the poster text to anyone who is interested.

Cheers,
Paul
From: "Paul Atkins" <paul.atkins@anu.edu.au>

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Dr Paul Atkins
Director of Research and the MBA Program
National Graduate School of Management
120 McCoy Circuit
The Australian National University
Canberra ACT 0200