Students and instructors may be frustrated with students' lack of understanding of sociological concepts. We suggest that the difficulty of teaching and learning sociology is that sociological concepts and relationships require the use of abstract reasoning patterns. Many students are unaccustomed to using these abstract reasoning patterns. We use…

Determined that the majority of 299 preservice teachers did not use formal reasoning patterns when they attempted to solve a variety of problems. Results obtained for controlling variables and for proportional, probabilistic, correlational, and combinatorial reasoning are discussed with implications for middle/junior high school science teaching.…