Heurísticas e vieses na escolha entre cursos de bacharelado e tecnológico

Abstract

This thesis aims to evaluate the effect of heuristics on students' choice between the bachelor's and technological training levels at the Instituto Federal do Tocantins. The procedure for obtaining the data resulted from the application of a questionnaire and its analysis was carried out using the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) technique based on orange data mining along with other relevant statistical methods, in order to meet the research objectives. The contributions of this study consist on developing a research that addresses the educational choices of students, seeking to understand the cognitive biases present or that may contribute to the choice between the educational levels of bachelor and technological degrees. Heuristics are based on the concept of learned rules that allow the recipient of the message to draw a conclusion about the information presented with very little cognitive effort, thus a choice based on mental shortcuts can result in systematic biases. The thesis of this study was based on the idea that the biases of insufficient anchor adjustment, the evaluation of conjunctive and disjunctive events, the recoverability of occurrences, the insensitivity to the base rate and the insensitivity to the sample size could be related to the students' choice regarding the training levels of bachelor and technologist. From the analyzes carried out, it was found that the students were influenced by the heuristics of anchoring and adjustment, availability and representativeness, thus making it possible to address the specific objectives. An interesting fact of the research is that, despite the use of heuristics by both formative levels, technologist students showed a greater inclination to incur the biases.