Individual differences in children's reasoning

grantor: University of TorontoA long history of developmental theory suggests that children's reasoning in more recent two-process theories of reasoning (Evans & Over, 1996; Sloman, 1996; Stanovich, 1999) that distinguish analytic from heuristic processing. However, contrary to some traditional developmental theories and to the two-process theories, some previous research into the development of inductive reasoning ability has suggested the counterintuitive finding that analytic processing ability may well decline with age from early childhood to early adulthood (e.g. Jacobs & Potenza, 1991; Davidson, 1995). In the present study the development of analytic and heuristic processing in children in grades five, six, and eight was examined using an inductive and a deductive reasoning task. The inductive task was designed to be analogous to the scenarios used by Jacobs and Potenza (1991) pitting individuating information against baserate information and was adapted for use by children. The deductive task was an experimental measure consisting of syllogisms taken from Markovits and Nantel (1989) and again, was adapted for use with children. Data from one hundred and eight students were examined. Results indicated that analytic processing improved with age. Further, cognitive ability was positively associated with analytic reasoning performance. Importantly, measures of thinking dispositions--specifically, the Actively Open-minded Thinking composite--predicted unique variance in reasoning performance after cognitive ability was partialled out. Overall, the results support the notion that analytic reasoning performance improves developmentally. Possible reasons for divergence from the results of Jacobs and Potenza (1991) are discussed.Ed.D