Organization of knowledge and conditional reasoning.

Abstract

The authors considered how the way in which knowledge is organized influences cientific reasoning. They adopted a constructivist approach to reasoning in which many-to-one schemata, linguistic mapping, and meaningful relations are assumed to be important components of hypothesis-testing skill. College students received a variant of Wason's election task in which the semantic ontent was either familiar or unfamiliar and the interclause r lations either did or did not express entailment. Results howed that entailment, which reflects knowledge organiza-tion, was more important than familiarity in determining adequate performance. These findings imply that the constructivist view proposed here is a more adequate account of reasoning than others because it alone emphasizes the organization of knowledge as important. Conditional reasoning--that is, reasoning with propositions of the form "if p, then q"--represents a critical form of deductive thought (Mayer, 1983; Overton, 1990). The impor-tance of conditional reasoning to educational issues derives from the fact that scientific reasoning consists of the formation and testing of "if...then " hypotheses and of the drawing of