Teaching Reasoning
- 30 October 1987
- journal article
- research article
- Published by American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Science
- Vol. 238 (4827), 625-631
- https://doi.org/10.1126/science.3672116
Abstract
Twentieth-century psychologists have been pessimistic about teaching reasoning, prevailing opinion suggesting that people may possess only domain-specific rules, rather than abstract rules; this would mean that training a rule in one domain would not produce generalization to other domains. Alternatively, it was thought that people might possess abstract rules (such as logical ones) but that these are induced developmentally through self-discovery methods and cannot be trained. Research suggests a much more optimistic view: even brief formal training in inferential rules may enhance their use for reasoning about everyday life events. Previous theorists may have been mistaken about trainability, in part because they misidentified the kind of rules that people use naturally.Keywords
This publication has 10 references indexed in Scilit:
- Teaching thinking skills.American Psychologist, 1986
- Pragmatic versus syntactic approaches to training deductive reasoningCognitive Psychology, 1986
- The effects of statistical training on thinking about everyday problemsCognitive Psychology, 1986
- Human Intelligence: The Model Is the MessageScience, 1985
- Pragmatic reasoning schemasCognitive Psychology, 1985
- The use of statistical heuristics in everyday inductive reasoning.Psychological Review, 1983
- On the Nature of IntelligenceScience, 1983
- The elusive thematic‐materials effect in Wason's selection taskBritish Journal of Psychology, 1982
- Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and BiasesScience, 1974
- The processes of causal attribution.American Psychologist, 1973