ON THE NATURE AND DEVELOPMENT OF CONDITIONAL REASONING IN EARLY ADOLESCENCE

Two studies investigated the conditional reasoning capabilities of eig hth grade learners. In Study 1, we analysed conditional reasoning perf ormances for differences in learners' abilities to solve problems corr ectly and propensities to be tricked into responding to problems in a biconditional manner. There seemed to be a developmental progression i n conditional reasoning ability. Most young adolescents reason using m emory of domain-specific memories. However, pragmatic inferential rule s may serve as an intermediate level of abstraction in reasoners as th ey progress from the ability to reason using only domain-specific expe rience to the ability to use content-free syntactic rules. In addition , correlation between scores on the Test of Logical Thinking and condi tional reasoning performances suggested that ability to reason deducti vely using inferential rules at progressively higher levels of abstrac tion is related to cognitive development. In Study 2, we assessed the effectiveness of an instructional application of pragmatic inferential rule theory for development of conditional reasoning abilities. Pragm atic reasoning skill was developed through engagement in Prolog progra mming activities involving hierarchical knowledge domains.