Deductive Reasoning with Prose Passages: Effects of Age, Inference Form, Prior Knowledge, and Reading Skill

Abstract

This study applied knowledge about inference-making from the deductive reasoning literature to the drawing of speci c inferences from prose passages . It explored the effects of age, inference form, prior knowledge, and reading skill on inferential comprehension. In Experiment 1, fourth-grade, seventhgrade, and college students read three prose passages, each containing six inferential questions based on premises expressed in the passages. Premise information was either true, false, or neutral with regard to subjects' prior knowledge. To answer the questions correctly, subjects were required to make deductive inferences with six different inference forms. Content (true, false, or neutral) and form interacted differently depending on the age of subjects, but content affected performance with at least some forms for all age groups. When reasoning with conditional forms, subjects' use of more advanced reasoning patterns with true content decreased with false and neutral content, where less advanced reasoning patterns were shown. In Experiment 2, the relationships among reading skill, inference form, and content were explored with seventh-grade and college students. For college students, reading skill had a positive main effect, but did not interact with form or content. For seventh-grad ers, skilled readers were better able than less skilled readers to reason from false and neutral premises with determinate inference forms.

Logical Inference Skills in Adult Reading Comprehension: Effects of Age and Formal Education

“…For all three age groups (including both college-educated and non-college educated adults in the oldest age group), the effects of form were first explored to see if the difference in difficulty found between indeterminate and determinate forms in the previous study (Franks, 1997) would also be found with this sample. As illustrated by Table 1, with determinate forms a logically necessary conclusion can be reached; with indeterminate forms, no conclusion can be reached.…”

“…MT, DA, and AC are often more difficult, even for adults Kodroff & Roberge, 1975;Taplin & Staudenmayer, 1973;Taplin, Staudenmayer, & Taddonio, 1974). However, in an earlier study using all these forms in prose passages (Franks, 1997), scores with DA and AC were significantly lower than scores with the other four forms, and scores on the other four forms were quite similar.…”

“…However, performance with logically necessary inference forms in the context of comprehending prose passages has rarely been explored. At the beginning of such an exploration, Franks (1997) observed the relative difficulty for children and adults to make various deductive inferences in this context. The present study continued this examination.…”

“…However, studies of age changes in metacognition, recall, and prose comprehension across the lifespan show mixed results; some observe decline with age, but others observe no decline and sometimes find improvement. The present study examined the performance of young, middle-aged, and older adults on the task described previously (Franks, 1997) to see if their performance would improve, remain constant, or decline with age.…”

: From inference to reasoning: The construction of rationality

“…At relatively advanced levels of metalogical understanding, typically beginning about age 11, it becomes possible to recognize and evaluate the logical interconnections among propositions that are hypothetical or even false (Efklides, Demetriou, & Metallidou, 1994;Franks, 1996Franks, , 1997Markovits & Bouffard-Bouchard, 1992;Markovits & Nantel, 1989;Markovits & Vachon, 1989;Moshman & Franks, 1986). As a result, adolescents and adults are able to consider the potential interrelations of multiple possibilities and thus to formulate and test explicit theories (Inhelder & Piaget, 1958;Kuhn, Amsel, & O'Loughlin, 1988;Moshman, 1998, in press-a; Zimmerman, 2000).…”