The Relationship between Reflective Disposition and Persistence in Education

Getting students to engage in reflective thought is a «wicked» problem in teaching. Students may demonstrate a resistance to any form of reflection, analysis or critical thought and instead automatically default to surface approaches which are non-productive in academic contexts. This resistance may involve an aversion which leads to students not persisting to higher levels of education and dropping out. The present study investigates the relationship between the resistance to reflective processing and persistence in education using the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) and some additional survey items aimed at testing surface processing tendencies in non-academic contexts. It provides support for the hypothesis that a general aversion to reflective processing appears to inhibit academic progression and correlates with drop-out from courses midstream. It closes by suggesting that aversion to analytical thinking may be a threshold issue that needs to be addressed separately before students can progress to any challenging content.