Children's acquisition of conditional logic structure: Teachable?

The present study was designed to assess the teachability of conditional logic structure, using a training-transfer paradigm. Some recent attempts to induce or teach conditional reasoning capability have not been very successful. A component process analysis of the syllogistic conditional reasoning task commonly used suggests that it involves three main components: (a) inductive rule learning—attribute coding and rule mapping, (b) induction of conditional language-“if-then” operator, and (c) deductive interpretation—decoding, matching, and evaluation. When trained on all these components, Grade 5 and 7 children became very competent in dealing with a criterion conditional reasoning task. The previous attempts might have missed the training of more than one of the subprocesses identified above.