Attridge-Doritou-Inglis-2015.pdf (241.91 kB)
The development of reasoning skills during compulsory 16 to 18 mathematics education
journal contribution
posted on 2015-12-15, 11:52 authored by Nina Attridge, Maria Doritou, Matthew InglisMatthew InglisThe belief that studying mathematics improves reasoning skills, known as the Theory of Formal Discipline (TFD), has been held since the time of Plato. Research evidence supports this idea, at least in the context of students who had chosen to study post-compulsory mathematics. Here we examined the development of reasoning skills in 16- to 18-year-old Cypriot students, who are required to study mathematics until age 18. One hundred and eighty-eight students, studying high- or low-intensity mathematics, completed the abstract Conditional Inference Task and the contextual Belief Bias Syllogisms task at ages 16, 17 and 18. While the high-intensity group improved on the conditional inference task and showed a reduction in belief bias, the low-intensity group did not change on either measure. This is promising for the TFD, but suggests that a certain level of mathematical study may be necessary for students' general reasoning skills to develop.
Funding
This research was partially supported by a Royal Society Worshipful Company of Actuaries Research Fellowship to MI.
History
School
- Science
Department
- Mathematics Education Centre
Published in
Research in Mathematics EducationVolume
17Issue
1Pages
20 - 37Citation
ATTRIDGE, N., DORITOU, M. and INGLIS, M., 2015. The development of reasoning skills during compulsory 16 to 18 mathematics education. Research in Mathematics Education, 17 (1), pp.20-37Publisher
Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group / (© 2015 British Society for Research into Learning Mathematics)Version
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Publication date
2015Notes
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Research in Mathematics Education on 12 Feb 2015, available online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14794802.2014.999014.ISSN
1479-4802eISSN
1754-0178Publisher version
Language
- en