Logical reasoning and fantasy contexts: eliminating differences between children with and without experience in school

Abstract

An experiment investigated the effect of a make-believe fantasy mode of problem presentation on reasoning about valid conditional syllogisms in three groups of 5-year-old children: a) school children from middle-class families in England; b) school children from middle-class families in Brazil; and, c) children from low SES families in Brazil who had never gone to school. Previous investigations had reported that the use of a fantasy context elicited significantly more logically appropriate responses from school children than did other contexts, and that children with school experiences made significantly more logically appropriate responses than did children without school experience. The present investigation extended these findings to show that the beneficial effects of a fantasy context extended to lower-class illiterate children who never had been exposed to schooling