The Interactional Effects of Students' Cognitive Levels and Test Characteristics on the Performance of Formal Reasoning Tasks

The study examines the effects of Piagetian-like tasks' characteristics on the performance of these tasks by different age group students. The tasks were taken from a developed and validated test (Shemesh, 1983) which measures students' reasoning skills in six cognitive operations: conservation, proportions, control of variables, probability, combinations and correlations. Subjects were seventh, ninth and twelfth grade students, enrolled in two urban schools. Three different 3X2 factorial research design experiments, with three levels of students age and two versions of the test in each experiment, were set up for this study. Experiment 1 tested the effect of the method of task presentation (video-taped demonstrations versus paper-and-pencil tasks with illustrations). Experiment 2 tested the effect of questionnaire format (multiple-choice versus short essay questions) and experiment 3 tested the effect of the numerical content (integer ratio like 1:2, 1:3 versus noninteger ratio like 2:3, 3:5) on different age group students' responses.