Emily Kleinfelder
Measuring Children's Reasoning Skills in an Everyday Setting
This summer I am working on developing an everyday reasoning measure suitable for middle school aged children. Higher order reasoning skills are becoming a crucial part of taking part in world full of scientific and technological advancements but there is currently not a measure designed to see how students take the reasoning skills they learn in the classroom and apply them to a non-academic setting. For my honors thesis in psychology, I am planning on running a study with children participating in a scientific reasoning curriculum to see if the everyday reasoning measure is a better indicator of academic achievement than abstract reasoning (which is reasoning devoid of a real-world context) and if there is any relation between the abstract reasoning and everyday reasoning scores.