Relationships among Performances on Group Administered Items of Formal Reasoning

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Abstract
50 ninth grade students who ranged widely in language ability responded to 10 group-administered pencil-paper items requiring various components of formal reasoning (isolation and control of variables, proportional reasoning, combinatorial reasoning). Responses on the 10 items were scored as correct or incorrect. Summed scores were obtained for the three components of formal reasoning. Correlation coefficients among the 10 items ranged widely (.18 to .65) but were all substantial among the summed scores. A principal components analysis of the summed scores yielded one factor which accounted for 72.3% of the variance. It is argued that single items do not provide a large enough sample of subjects' reasoning to determine reliably level of intellectual development and that summed scores represent a better estimate. Viewed in this way the results were interpreted to be supportive of the Piagetian hypothesis that the various components of formal reasoning develop in synchrony.

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