Undergraduate students’ perception of cardiorespiratory physiology during exercise: teleological vs. mechanistic thinking

Physiology is widely recognized as a difficult course, which can potentially increase students’ withdrawal and failures rates. Several factors are likely contributing to the difficulties in learning physiology, including inherent features of the discipline as well as aspects related to instructions and/or students’ perception. With regards to the later, it is currently unknown how students of exercise physiology think and explain physiology in terms of its cause or consequence (i.e., teleological or mechanistic thinking). Therefore, the aims of the present study were to determine 1) whether undergraduate students’ perception of cardiorespiratory physiology during exercise follows a predominant teleological or mechanistic thinking, and 2) whether prior enrollment in physiology courses can influence the predominance of teleological vs. mechanistic thinking.

The test instrument was an online questionnaire about exercise physiology consisting of nine incomplete sentences about exercise physiology where students had to choose between a teleological or a mechanistic complement. The questionnaire was administered to undergraduate students in the following areas: 1) Movement Sciences (n = 152), 2) Health-related (n = 81) and, 3) Health-unrelated programs (n = 64). Students in Movement Sciences and Health-related programs were also analyzed separately in the following categories: 1) students who previously undertook physiology courses, and 2) students who did not take physiology courses.

Overall, all groups presented a percentage of teleological thinking above 58%, which is considerably high. Teleological thinking was significantly higher in health-unrelated programs than health-related and movement sciences programs (76 ± 16% vs. 58 ± 26% vs. 61 ± 25%; P < 0.01). Further, students with prior enrollment in physiology classes presented a significantly lower percentage of teleological thinking than students without physiology classes (59 ± 25% vs. 72 ± 22%, respectively; P < 0.01), but the overall teleological reasoning remained predominant.

These results confirm the hypothesis that undergraduate students tend to present teleological as opposed to mechanistic thinking in exercise physiology. Furthermore, although undergraduate students with prior enrollment in physiology classes presented significantly lower teleological thinking, it remained highly predominant suggesting that teleological thinking is partially independent of the degree of familiarity with this discipline.