The purpose of this proposed quantitative, ex post facto, comparative study with a pretest-posttest design was to assess gains in overall Critical Thinking (CT) skills, and particularly in the Hypothetical-deductive Reasoning (HDR) skills, for pre-health college students tested before and after a Critical Analyses in Science course they attended…

Mechanistic reasoning about an artifact or system involves thinking about its underlying entities and the properties, activities, and cause-effect relationships of those entities. Previous studies of children's mechanistic reasoning about engineering solutions have mostly focused on specific mechanical systems such as gear trains. Yet there is…

In this paper, we seek to evaluate the extent to which students can follow a deductive reasoning chain when it is presented to them. A great deal of instruction in introductory physics courses is centered on presenting students with a logical argument that starts from first principles and systematically leads to a particular conclusion. This…

BrainPOP Science is a research-based program that has been shown to be effective in improving and quickly developing students' scientific reasoning skills. This white paper presents a comprehensive case study conducted in school districts in the Southeastern United States. BrainPOP Science is one of the leading supplemental middle school programs.…

Background: The competencies for the 21st century are defined as a broad and interrelated system of knowledge, skills, values and attitudes enabling the full application of man in personal and professional life. Regarding the science education competencies combining science and scientific knowledge, as well as skills such as inquiry, critical…

This concluding commentary takes the perspective of research on practicing scientists and engineers to consider what open areas and future directions on relational thinking and learning should be considered beyond the impressive research presented in the special issue. Areas for more work include (a) a need to examine educational applications of…

This paper argues that science education has overemphasized the importance of construction at the expense of critique. In doing so, it draws on two key premises--Ford's argument that the construction of knowledge requires a dialectic between construction and critique and Mercier and Sperber's theory of argumentative reasoning that critique is…

This article explains four kinds of inquiry exercises, different in purpose, for teaching advanced-level high school and college students the hypothetico-deductive (H-D) method. The first uses a picture of a river system to convey the H-D method's logic. The second has teams of students use the H-D method: their teacher poses a hypothesis…

Video games have recently become a popular space for educational design due to their interactive and engaging nature and the ubiquity of the gaming experience among youth. Though many researchers argue video games can provide opportunities for learning, educational game design has focused on the classroom rather than the informal settings where…

Four tasks which are frequently used to evaluate adolescent reasoning skill: (1) the pendulum task; (2) the ramp problem; (3) the cart experiment; and (4) the invisible magnetism experiment are analyzed to determine the Piagetian concepts that each measures. (CP)

Students (N=22) enrolled in secondary school biology were evaluated for their abilities to use: combinatorial logic; correlational reasoning; separation and control of variables; exclusion of irrelevant variables; proportional reasoning; and probabilistic reasoning. Each student responded individually to six Piagetian tasks designed to measure…

Describes steps involved in the construction of a 15-item test to measure formal reasoning in junior and senior high school students. From analysis, the author concludes that the test has face, convergent, and factorial validities. (CP)

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…

Three task context factors that form obstacles to generalizing logical reasoning strategies for adolescents are discussed. The relationship between these obstacle factors and Piagetian theory is explored. Findings suggest that it is possible to make some predictions about how and when logical mechanisms will be generalized to new situations.…

This study hypothesized that subjects who display proportional responses on the Pouring Water Task have developed the ability to comprehend logical arguments of the form referred to as "reasoning to a contradiction," while subjects who display additive responses on the same task have not. To test this hypothesis, 100 additive and…