Ascertaining the critical thinking and formal reasoning skills of students With the critical thinking movement gaining momentum at all levels of education in the United States and other countries, many thinking programmes have been developed. A thinking programme that emphasises process, teaching students how to think, rather than what to think, is the Philosophy for Children (P4C) programme, currently carried out in Singapore. A child, according to Matthew Lipman, the founder of the P4C programme, can reason deductively and logically, using concrete objects. In his specially written stories for children Lipman translated the abstract formulations to reasoning in a concrete way that children could understand. To determine whether primary and secondary pupils in Singapore can reason and do philosophy, a study was set up in 1992 to ascertain their reasoning skills. Two instruments were used: the New Jersey Test of Reasoning, developed in the early 1980s to evaluate the P4C programme, and the Test of Formal Reasoning, written by P. K. Arlin to measure the stage of intellectual and cognitive level of the student: concrete, high concrete, transitional, low formal or high formal. This article reports the findings of the study concerning the relationship between critical thinking as measured by the NJTR and concrete and formal reasoning as measured by the ATFR.
Formal reasoning about runtime code update