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Analogical reasoning and the nature of context: A research note
Author(s) -
Richardson Ken,
Webster David S.
Publication year - 1996
Publication title -
british journal of educational psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.557
H-Index - 95
eISSN - 2044-8279
pISSN - 0007-0998
DOI - 10.1111/j.2044-8279.1996.tb01173.x
Subject(s) - analogy , raven's progressive matrices , presupposition , psychology , analogical reasoning , verbal reasoning , context (archaeology) , cognition , cognitive psychology , test (biology) , epistemology , paleontology , philosophy , neuroscience , biology
Recent theorising about children's reasoning has tended to move towards a ‘contextualist’ view of cognition and away from the idea of an overall, context‐free, mechanism, varying in efficiency, which is the presupposition underlying traditional standardised reasoning tests. An earlier study suggesting improved reasoning performance among children on socio‐cognitively meaningful versions of Raven's Matrices tended to support this shift. The main purpose of the study reported here was to observe whether a similar improvement would be found with contextually‐based analogical reasoning problems as well. Ten analogy items from a standardised test were administered to 11‐year‐olds together with 10 structurally‐equivalent knowledge‐based items. The results reflected improved performance on the latter, overall, and additional analyses led to further suggestions about the nature of the ‘contextual advantage’ and the origins of item difficulty.