THE COMPONENTIAL ANALYSIS OF ANALOGICAL REASONING ABILITIES OF LEARNING DISABLED AND NORMAL ACHIEVING ELEMENTARY-AGED CHILDREN: A COMPARATIVE AND DESCRIPTIVE INVESTIGATION

DEBORAH CROCKETT SIMMONS, Purdue University

Abstract

The two-experiment investigation had two primary purposes: (a) to compare the analogical reasoning abilities of intellectually comparable learning disabled and normal achieving children, and (b) to examine the component skill proficiencies of each of these groups when engaged in verbal analogy solution. Each of these issues was separately examined in 10 and 12 year old subjects. In the first experiment, subjects were administered, in small group settings, 25 age-appropriate, choice-response verbal analogies from the Cognitive Abilities Test. Results of analyses of variance indicate that learning disabled subjects' performance on choice-response verbal analogies is significantly poorer than that of their normal achieving peers at both the 10 and 12 year old levels. In a second experiment, a five-phase componential analysis of verbal analogy solution was employed to critically examine the analogical reasoning skill of learning disabled and normal achieving subjects. The componential analysis assessed each subject's: (a) initial analogy solution, (b) knowledge of vocabulary terms, (c) knowledge of relational components, (d) final analogy solution, and (e) justification of analogy solution. Subsumed under each of these phases was a hierarchy of task formats (i.e., prompted and unprompted) designed to examine the conceptual and procedural competencies of learning disabled and normal achievers. A hierarchical sequence of analyses was executed to examine the effect of learner classification on elementary-aged childrens' analogical reasoning ability. The results of multivariate analyses (MANOVA), subsequent univariate tests on individual phase scores, and conditional probability analyses of task performance within specific phases are summarized as follows: (a) there is a significant difference in LD and normal achievers' ability to reason by analogy at both the 10 and 12 year old age levels, (b) LD subjects are significantly less proficient than normal achieving subjects in their knowledge and/or deployment of component skills within verbal analogies, (c) learning disabled subjects experience significant difficulty producing spontaneous solutions to both intact analogies and isolated analogy components, and (d) the efficacy of prompted tasks with learning disabled subjects appears contingent on the form of the prompt and the content and complexity of the tasks.

Degree

Ph.D.

Subject Area

Special education

COinS