Logical connectives in science: Some preliminary findings

Logical connectives are words or phrases which serve as links between sentences, or between propositions within a sentence, or between a proposition and a concept. The Logical Connectives in Science Project has identified about 200 such terms commonly use in school science text material, and has prepared over a thousand test items in order to measure secondary school students’ comprehension of these terms. The primary aim of the research is to identify students’ specific difficulties; a secondary aim is to explore the relationships between students’ ability to comprehend logical connectives and other variables of interest to educational researchers. The research is still in progress; the present paper reports on recent work in four areas: (1) early findings on pupils’ difficulties with logical connectives, based on data obtained from the trial testing of the items; (2) the relationship between logical connective ability (LCA) and socio-economic status (SES); (3) the relationship between LCA and cognitive preferences; and (4) the relationship between LCA and attitudes to a textbook (PSSC Physics) which makes extensive use of a wide range of logical connectives. Significant correlations were found between LCA and SES; however, LCA was found to be uncorrelated with either cognitive preferences or with attitudes to the PSSC text.