Examined hypothesis that experiences unique to schooling account for improved performance on invalid conditional syllogisms with age. Found small negative effect from out-of-school experiences and considerable positive effect of schooling; hence, unlike other cognitive tasks in which schooling operates in same direction as out-of-school…

We explore the immediate and longer term consequences of different types of instruction about a central topic in middle school science: the "Control of Variables Strategy" (CVS). CVS represents the procedural and conceptual basis for designing simple, unconfounded experiments, such that unambiguous causal inferences can be made. CVS…