Investigation on the Primary School Children's Abilities of Formal Reasoning

초등학생들의 형식적 추론 능력에 관한 연구

We investigated on the primary school children's abilities of formal reasoning. Seventy students in grade 5 participated in the study. They responsed their best reactions on the problems constituted of three parts requiring the informal or formal reasoning and generalization. Their reactions are classified by some criteria depending the level of reasoning. About 10 students showed that they constructed a kind of scheme for solving the problems, similar to formal reasoning and beyond naive informal reasoning. And about 30 students did so partially. We concluded that the teaching and learning of reasoning by the progressive increasing the degree of rigor from grade 5 is possible.