"Think of the Wrong Answer": Extending Inhibition Effects in Chemistry Multiple-Choice Questions

This study extends Talanquer's (2017) finding that prompting students to identify the intuitively appealing but incorrect answer—alongside their actual response—improves performance on chemistry concept
inventories. Grounded in dual-process theory (System 1/System 2 reasoning) and cognitive inhibition research, the project replicates this effect among French-speaking Belgian students, addressing a gap highlighted
by Ott et al. (2025), whose attempt to replicate the effect in physics (Force Concept Inventory) failed, suggesting domain-dependence.
Three research questions guide the work: (1) whether the specific "predict the wrong answer" prompt outperforms a general awareness-raising instruction ("this is a trick question"); (2) whether the effect generalizes
to conventional exam-style multiple-choice questions, beyond the original Intuitive Concept Inventory (ICI) format; and (3) whether the prompt's effectiveness diminishes across successive questions due to fatigue
or habituation. The ICI was translated into French and validated by chemistry education experts. Preliminary data collection (April–May 2025) will involve ~100 first-year biology undergraduates and 50 secondary
school students (ages 15–17), randomly assigned to control, wrong-answer-prediction, or general-awareness conditions using a double-questionnaire design. Later phases will expand to larger and more diverse
cohorts across educational levels.The author acknowledges that, since data collection was incomplete at submission, evaluation must rest on the theoretical and methodological framing rather than results.