Cognitive Development in School Context • Scientific and Logical Reasoning

The ability to induce an hypothesis and deduce its empirical implications constitutes hypothetico-deductive reasoning. Research on logical reasoning, hypothesis testing, and induction has found that children, as well as adults, have difficulty in this rigorous form of scientific reasoning. We are exploring whether it is possible to support and improve this reasoning by helping people visualize their hypotheses plus teach a computer agent (using matrix representations) who reasons based on those hypotheses. (For more details on the teachable agent application for this work, read about Moby in the Teachable Agents section.) Work with teenagers has shown impressive results on reasoning posttests. The current work is examining whether younger children also benefit. The approach has been to let children first try to induce, express, and apply rules unaided. If they have difficulty, we demonstrate how to do it. Afterwards, we test whether children were prepared to learn from the demonstration by giving them new problems. Thus far, we have found that at least 4th-graders can learn to reason about negation, necessity, sufficiency, and they can work with two factors in a conjunctive relation. Current plans include working with even younger children, as well as testing whether children who work with the teachable agent are in a good position to learn how to reason hypothetico-deductively in a transfer situation involving science content.