Brandon L. Bretl, PhD
I research social, cultural, and psychological factors in science education. Currently I am working on a theoretical framework to assess conceptual knowledge structures through natural language for the purpose of predicting creative and innovative potential of individuals and groups. I am specifically interested in how different educational contexts produce "richer" or "sparser" forms of understanding. Along these lines, I am developing a conversational AI agent to probe conceptual structure and provide metrics along three interdependent dimensions: causal-mechanistic depth, network integration and coherence, and embodied generative flexibility.
Character Foundations Survey
Brandon Bretl, Principal Investigator
KU IRB: STUDY00142366
The Character Foundations Survey (CFS) is an instrument for studying how moral intuitions (feelings about right and wrong) are influenced by various factors like age, sex, gender identity, political ideology, religion, education, and other socio-cultural, epistemological, and demographic factors.
Students rate a series of conventional and moral violations on degree of wrongness and outcomes are analyzed via confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). Covariances between factors and factor means are compared to look for unique developmental patterns.
The CFS is based on a synthesis of moral foundations theory and social domain theory. Through this synthesis, adolescent moral development can be seen as the result of a gene-culture coevolutionary process, and more rigorous predictions about adolescent moral development can be made.
To date, more than 3,000 middle and high school students from more than 11 different schools in Kansas have taken the CFS.
Assessing Effects of Variable Presentations of Gender Information in Text-based Moral Intuition Assessments.
Brandon Bretl, Principal Investigator
Preliminary analysis shows significant effects of the order in which gender information is presented in text-based moral violation vignettes. These effects are consistent with literature on the time courses of text-based priming effects and stereotype activation. See my paper in The Journal of Psychology at https://doi.org/10.1080/00223980.2020.1832034.
This paradigm offers many opportunities to assess theories of cognitive processes during moral intuition deployment and the influence of stereotype activation in moral judgments.
