Therapeutic reasoning is when the purpose, task, or goal for engaging in reasoning is to determine the patient's management plan. As the field's understanding of the process of therapeutic reasoning is less well understood, we focused on studies that collected data on the process of therapeutic reasoning. To synthesize previous studies of…

A critical component of scientific reasoning is the consideration of alternative explanations. Recognizing that decades of cognitive psychology research have demonstrated that relative cognitive accessibility, or "what comes to mind," strongly affects how people reason in a given context, we articulate a simple "cognitive…

Test results from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) reveal that Shanghai students performed less well in solving interactive problems (those that require uncovering necessary information) than in solving analytical problems (those having all information disclosed at the outset). Accordingly, this study investigates…

Researchers have proposed that an explicit reasoning system is responsible for learning rule-based category structures and that a separate implicit, procedural-learning system is responsible for learning information-integration category structures. As evidence for this multiple-system hypothesis, researchers report a dissociation based on…

Using multitrait, multimethod data, and confirmatory factor analysis, the current study examined the effects of arithmetic item formatting and the possibility that across formats, abilities other than arithmetic may contribute to children's answers. Measurement hypotheses were guided by several leading theories of arithmetic cognition. With a…

This study investigated the role of broad cognitive processes in the development of mathematics skills among children and adolescents. Four hundred and forty-seven students (age mean [M] = 10.23 years, 73% boys and 27% girls) from an elementary school district in the US southwest participated. Structural equation modelling tests indicated that…

Do people with different kinds of bodies think differently? According to the "body-specificity hypothesis," people who interact with their physical environments in systematically different ways should form correspondingly different mental representations. In a test of this hypothesis, 5 experiments investigated links between handedness and the…

Three experiments examined strategies for solving suppositional deductions to compare control structures proposed by rule theory and model theory. Puzzles were based on assertors who may be truth-tellers and their assertions about their truth-telling status. Reasoners made backward and forward inferences, found generating suppositions difficult,…

This study hypothesized that subjects who display proportional responses on the Pouring Water Task have developed the ability to comprehend logical arguments of the form referred to as "reasoning to a contradiction," while subjects who display additive responses on the same task have not. To test this hypothesis, 100 additive and…

Two selection and nine evaluation hypothesis testing tasks varying systematically with respect to causality, response alternatives, and context continuity were administered to two samples of adults (N=35; N=32). It was to determine effects of these variables and the degree to which subjects reasoned with material conditional, biconditional,…

Students (N=387) in grades 8, 10, 12, and college were administered eight reasoning items to test hypothesis that the basic logic utilized in individuals in scientific hypothesis testing is the biconditional and that the biconditional is a precondition for development of formal operations. Results and implications for science instruction are…

Mathematical tasks calling for relational thinking were given to 60 children of Indian, Pakistani, or Bangladeshi origin who had spent their school lives in England, 60 who had arrived within the past 3 years, and 60 British children. Differences in the ability to abstract, hypothesize, and generalize were studied. (KC)

In a test the presence or absence of a "structure" in the individual's cognitive processes of formal operations thinking, 61 fourth, fifth, and sixth grade students were administered three tasks supposedly requiring such a method of thinking. The three tasks were (1) a problem solving task (PS), (2) a chemistry task requiring a certain combination…

Representational competence refers to the individual's capability to respond appropriately to external representations. For example, a child engaged in a grouping task may collect together all like objects even if the group contains varying representations of the object, including (1) the object itself, (2) a three-dimensional likeness of the…