People with diagnosed autism or being high in autistic traits have been found to have difficulties with recognizing emotions from nonverbal expressions. In this study, we investigated whether speeded reasoning (reasoning performance under time pressure) moderates the inverse relationship between autistic traits and emotion recognition performance.…

Making inferences and reasoning with new scientific information is critical for successful performance in biology coursework. Thus, identifying students who are weak in these skills could allow the early provision of additional support and course placement recommendations to help students develop their reasoning abilities, leading to better…

This article presents the results of a qualitative research with a group of 15 university students of social sciences on informal inferential reasoning developed in a computer environment on concepts involved in the confidence intervals. The results indicate that students developed a correct reasoning about sampling variability and visualized…

Aim/Purpose: Research shows that students encounter difficulties in identifying the structure of argumentation texts and in understanding the main message of the argument. The research examined the effect that learning Logic Programming (LP), while applying logic inference, has on students' understanding of argumentation texts. Background:…

The study of formal logic helps to improve the process of thinking and tries to refine and improve the thinking ability. The objectives of this study are to know the effectiveness of formal logic course and to determine the critical thinking variables that are effective and that are ineffective. A sample of 214 students is selected from all the…

This Action Research project and Pilot Study was designed and implemented to improve students' hypothetical thinking abilities by exploring the possibility that learning and playing the computer game Minesweeper may inherently help improve hypothetical thinking. One objective was to use educational tools to make it easier for students to learn the…

Within the context of a mathematics reform effort to implement algebra in elementary schools, there is a pressure to provide results in the form of student achievement scores. However, widely-used measures of student achievement may be unrelated to the ideas and instructional practices encouraged by the reform effort. The inappropriate use of…

In Study 1, 10-, 13-, and 16-year-olds were assigned to conditions in which they were instructed to think logically and provided alternative antecedents to the consequents of conditional statements. Providing alternatives improved reasoning on two uncertain logical forms, but decreased logical responding on two certain forms; logic instructions…

Two studies examined conditional reasoning with false premises. In Study 1, 12- and 16-year-old adolescents made "if-then" inferences after producing an alternative antecedent for the major premise. Older participants made more errors on the simple modus ponens inference than did younger ones. Reasoning with a false premise reduced this effect.…