Ten- and 12-year-old students received instruction that demonstrated the terms and relationships of conditional syllogisms. Both discovery and rule instruction increased average performance on written syllogistic reasoning tests; discovery instruction was generally more effective than rule instruction. (Author/LC)

Three training methods differing in degree of abstraction (demonstration, slide-diagram, and diagram) were used to instruct adolescents (26 control and 21 aphasic) in the completion of two tasks. Results indicated that aphasics have a deficit of abstract thinking which can prove a handicap in training situations. Ten sources are cited. (EJS)

Recommends teaching syllogistic reasoning and fallacies in the undergraduate writing course. (JL)

Investigates in an experimental setting the claim that young children have some knowledge of the rules of correspondence between language and reality which are central to propositional logic. (EKN)

Compared two theories of logical processing: the Atmosphere Effect and the Logical Ambiguity Hypothesis. Found that the Atmosphere Effect was significantly more successful in predicting the most likely response to premise pairs. Concludes that the Atmosphere Effect remains the best empirical theory of how people respond to deductive reasoning…

The Test of Logical Thinking was designed to measure five modes of formal reasoning: controlling variables, proportional reasoning, combinatorial reasoning, probabilistic reasoning, and correlational reasoning. Analysis of data from students, grades 6-16 indicated high test reliability and confirmed that the test measures one underlying dimension,…

The case method is a modern discipline of mind, based on classical models of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and well suited to the education of lawyers, whether in scholarly work or advocacy. It produces sharpness and speed of tongue and mind and a facility for precision, clarity, and quality of expression. (MSE)

Possible legal justifications for "reasons"--statements that justify conclusions--are discussed. It is suggested that justification is a concept that should be taken seriously and is one that is guided by objective standards, authority, tautology, tradition, consequences, comparison, intuitive moral sense, internal consistency, determinism, or…

Examined effects of cognitive focusing training in early and late concrete operational children. Focusing was manifested by the late concrete operational children regardless of whether or not they had been trained. The amount of negative feedback and the nature of the probe techniques affected the manifestation of focusing. (Author/DB)

Factors affecting the failure to use world knowledge to complete an otherwise incomplete linear ordering was examined. Failure persisted after three repetitions was unaffected by order of presentation or nature of test procedure. Performance was affected by overall amounts of known and new information and by their relation. (Author/RD)

Recent studies of deductive reasoning are reviewed with respect to three questions: Do people reason logically? Is reasoning introspectible? Is reasoning sequential? It is argued that the evidence of reasoning experiments suggests a negative answer to all three questions, indicating that these experiments don't study "reasoning" in its everyday…

The inquiry approach to learning is based on three phases. The exploratory phase encourages students to investigate a particular topic; the invention phase asks students to consider what they have learned; the final phase assists students in discovering the inadequacies of their inventions. (JN)

Children aged 6 to l7 were taught novel class inclusion hierarchies, analogous to the relation among oaks, pines, and trees. The results indicated that the part-whole structure of collections is simpler to establish and maintain than the structure of inclusion. (Author/RL)

Three-item pictorial sequences were shown to five-, six-, and seven-year-old children who were told to remember the events. Children were tested subsequently on their abilities to recognize old pictures and to select new pictures that were consistent with previously viewed sequences. (JMB)

Children's abilities to search for missing objects in real-life environments were investigated in two studies using 20 children aged 2-6 years. (Author/MP)