ABSTRACT
Kuhn, Deanna; Ho, Victoria; and Adams, Catherine. Formal Reasoning among Pre-and Late Adolescents. Child Development, 1979, 50, 1128–1135. The purpose of this study was to explore the sense in which older adolescents and adults may, as earlier research has suggested, lack the competence to reason at a formal operational level. 2 groups of subjects were isolated who showed no evidence of formal reasoning on isolation-of-variables assessment problems. 1 group consisted of preadolescents and the other first-year college students. Despite the initial matching of the 2 groups, when subjects were (a) administered additional kinds of assessment problems and (b) presented repeated problems over a period of months most of the college subjects showed immediate and substantial formal reasoning, while the preadolescents made only gradual, modest gains. It was concluded that the 2 groups were not at all “nonformal-operational” in an equivalent sense. The possibility was considered that the absence of a formal operational level of performance on the part of many older adolescents or adults may to a large extent reflect cognitive processing difficulties in dealing with the problem formats, rather than absence of underlying reasoning competencies.
