How Do Primary School Pupils Think? Syllogistic Reasoning in Primary School Children

In this study, we propose to analyze aspects related to the development of syllogistic reasoning during primary school. We selected 215 primary school children, who were asked to solve two lists of syllogisms: a list of 16 syllogisms, grouped into 4 categories: universally affirmative, universally negative, particularly affirmative and particularly negative and a list of eight counterfactual syllogisms, two belonging to each category. The results of the survey show that, in the case of intergroup comparisons, no significant differences are registered among young schoolchildren in solving syllogisms; these differences arise in solving counterfactual syllogisms. Intragroup comparisons allow us to state that the positive form of syllogisms draws better results than the negative one. (C) 2015 Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license.