Fifty-six Dutch school children (aged 6-0 to 14-4 years) participated in a study designed to investigate their ability to reason with logical implication. They answered a total of 32 reasoning problems. Before or after each question they were asked a class inclusion question. A high degree of correspondence was found between class inclusion and…

THE PURPOSE OF THE EXPERIMENT WAS TO DETERMINE THE DEGREE TO WHICH PHYSIOLOGICAL AROUSAL, AS INDEXED BY THE GRASON STADLER TYPE OPERANT CONDITIONING APPARATUS (GSR), IS RELATED TO THE ACCURACY OF LOGICAL REASONING. THE STIMULI WERE 12 SYLLOGISMS, THREE OF EACH OF FOUR DIFFERENT LOGICAL FORMS. THE 14 SUBJECTS (SS) INDICATED THEIR AGREEMENT OR…

Richard Whately's imprecise description of the concept "presumption" and the brevity of his treatment of it have led to confusion in applying the concept within the realm of argumentation. In proposing a theory to eliminate such confusion, it is argued that any dispute concerning the concept of presumption and its attendant burden of proof ("onus…

GIVEN THE TASK OF LEARNING A SERIES OF RANDOMLY ORDERED MEANINGFUL ITEMS, MOST SUBJECTS (SS) IMPOSE SOME ORGANIZATION ON THE MATERIAL DURING THE PROCESS OF LEARNING. AN EXPERIMENTAL PARADIGM IS DESCRIBED WHICH PERMITS THE OBJECTIVE SCORING OF EACH S'S SUBJECTIVE ORGANIZATION OF THE MATERIAL ON EACH LEARNING TRIAL. THE CENTRAL FEATURE OF THE…

The purpose of this paper is to present a dimensional simplification of the concept of "critical thinking" ("the correct assessing of statements") which will provide a basis for research. Three dimensions of critical thinking--logical, criterial, pragmatic--are distinguished, and 12 aspects of critical thinking are identified and elaborated by a…

This is a collection of five essays on futurism. In the first, Thomas contends that human beings will need more than ever to be taught the basic skills of communications and that communication will have to be multilingual. In the second essay, Katz explores the notion of teaching people to think, contrasting the Deway inquiry model and the…

This paper attempts to show that the significant difference between the enthymeme and the dialectic syllogism rests on the similarity of purpose of both dialectic and rhetoric, and on the differences in the respondents to which they address themselves. To support this thesis, the author reviews several contemporary approaches which have dealt with…

This study examined the decision-making process of prospective teachers to determine to what extent authoritarianism influences decisions about the validity of categorical syllogisms with attitudinally relevant conclusions. The Minnesota Teacher Attitude Inventory (MTAI) and the California F Scale were administered to 100 education students to…

In this report on cognitive processes, a discussion of the rationale and assumptions used by investigators explains the experimental procedures. To determine actual cognitive problem-solving processes, (rather than inferring them from results), subjects in these studies were presented with a problem and allowed to ask a sequence of questions which…

Ten kindergarten and 46 first grade children were given two-choice object discrimination problems, during which a prompt indicated the positive (rewarded) object, P. Guided by the prompt, all Ss subjects displaced P and therefore observed only its reward value; no direct observation was made of the reward value of the negative (nonrewarded)…

Forty-four education and 44 dental students were administered a 30-item syllogism test containing five syllogic forms six times repeated in three different content forms--technical dental terms, common dental terms, and content-free (letters). Data were analyzed using a two-factor with repeated measures on one factor design. It was found that…

This study is based on an earlier investigation by Brant and Trabasso, in which it was demonstrated that 4-year-old children could perform transitive inferences when training forced information encoding by involving questions about two comparative dimensions of an object (long and short). The present study was designed to examine the sources of…

A commentary on the sense of isolation and estrangement which commonly accompanies the relativism ushered in by formal operational thought, and a detailing of several regressive strategies frequently employed by adolescents in their efforts to accomodate to this plurality of solitudes. (JMB)

This study examined the development of three schemes for the attribution of psychological events to multiple causes in children of 5, 9, and 13 years of age. Stories were read to the children and each child was asked to infer possible causes of events. Multiple sufficient and multiple necessary and inhibitory causes were found only in the older…

Children aged 5, 9, and 13 years did work superior to, equal to, or inferior to another child and allocated reward between them. The three age groups showed qualitatively different allocations consistent with hypothesized age-related stages: (1) no relation of allocation to relative work, (2) preservation of rank from work to reward, and (3)…