A study investigating developmental differences in the ability to reason with conditional propositions used five variations of Wason's selection task to assess conditional reasoning in 132 eighth, tenth, and twelfth grade adolescents. In addition to examining developmental differences, the study had as an objective to examine the role of semantic…

Deductive reasoning problems were presented to 72 public elementary school students, half of whom were identified as gifted (mean age of 9.6 years) and half of whom were regular education students (mean age of 9.3 years). They were used to test an hypothesis that gifted children who score significantly higher than average on standardized…

Many science curriculum development projects have the goal of increasing students' ability to employ scientific or formal reasoning strategies. Argues that longitudinal data of students who acquired formal reasoning strategies as a consequence of specific instruction are needed to provide evidence that these skills will help in other academic…

Studied 100 adolescents' approaches to problem-solving proofs and reasoning competence tasks. Found that a formal level of reasoning competence is associated with a deductive approach. Results support the notion of a cognitive development progression from an inductive approach to a deductive approach. (ETB)

Tested with adolescents and adults two predictions from Markovits and Barrouillet's developmental model of conditional reasoning related to the effects of the association between antecedent and consequent terms and the formulation of the minor premise on uncertainty responses. Found results consistent with hypotheses and indicating importance of…

Children and undergraduate students were studied to expose "structure-neutral" interpretations of logical propositions involving universal affirmatives. Successes with true and false questions and with four different syllogistic forms having three content types were compared. Age-related differences in performance were discussed with…

Longitudinal data on conversations recorded from 1 child between 18 and 27 months of age and 3 children between 27 and 62 months were analyzed to chart acquisition of the word "if" and of conditional inference. Within six months of speaking their first "if," children produced "ifs" at the same rate and forms as…

Three experiments using university students explored what constitutes an event and what determines its boundaries. Results supported the hypothesis that sequences of stimuli repeating in different contexts are cut out to become cognitive entities ("things" with a beginning and an end) in their own right. Results suggest that the…

This study had two purposes: (1) to determine when children distinguish ambiguous from precise messages and when they can resolve ambiguity through additional questioning, and (2) to identify whether implicit messages were more difficult to identify than explicit ones. All children found ambiguous messages significantly more difficult to…

Research has indicated that one significant deficiency in the intellectual capabilities of disadvantaged children is a disability in abstract thinking. Although all very young children lack this ability, the environment of the middle class child provides an opportunity so that as this child matures, the ability to think in abstract terms naturally…

This educational research project is designed to assess an elementary student's quality of reasoning in relation to map skills and to determine spatial concept abilities. 21 activities are designed to test sense of proportion, scale, dimension, accurate relationship, and abstract thinking. The related topographical map, a Map-Study Scoring Key,…

Describes the importance of learning to connect separate universes of knowledge into a coherent whole. It is a mistake to emphasize connecting schools to the Internet without considering the kinds of thinking processes students need in order to learn from the information they access. (LMI)

Compared the use of conditional logic in adult-adult and adult-child conversation. Results indicated that conversation patterns and inferences were similar except that children made fewer independent inferences and shifts in taxonomic level and responded more frequently to socially controlling statements than did adults. (AA)