| Summary: | Twelve experiments
examined ways of improving informal reasoning, as assesed by presenting
students with accessible, current, and interesting social and political issues,
eliciting reasoning about them, and scoring the reasoning for quality of
argument. The experiments asked: (1) the impact of established instructional
programs that emphasized critical thinking (Experiments 1--4); (2) the impact
of an investigator-designed high school level minicourse (Experiments 5--7);
(3) the responsiveness of subjects to prompts that asked them to develop
arguments more fully, and the relation of their responses to general
intelligence (Experiments 8--10); (4) checks on the validity of the testing
methodology (Experiments 11--12). Two of the established instructional programs
had a beneficial effect. The minicourse had a particularly large effect on
students' attention to the other side of the case, the most neglected aspect of
informal reasoning. The prompting studies showed that subjects could develop
their arguments far more than they normally did. Finally, subjects with higher
intelligence were actually somewhat more biased in their reasoning. In summary:
people can reason much better than they typically do on the sorts of issues
posed; people are not performing near the limits of their abilities; strategies
and standards of good reasoning can improve reasoning; and education can
develop students' reasoning much further than education typically
does.
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