A New Look to a Classic Issue: Reasoning and Academic Achievement at Secondary School

The Role of Trait and State Mindfulness in Cognitive Performance of Male Adolescents

Purpose

The number of mindfulness intervention projects is continually increasing. Within the educational environment, mindfulness has purported links to well-being, positive behaviour, educational and cognitive performance. Trait mindfulness is related to rational thinking and better performance in cognitive tests, suggesting that innate mindfulness ability contributes to self-regulation ability and thus the efficacy of mindfulness interventions. The current study investigates whether mindfulness is a moderating factor. It examines correlations between cognitive performance and trait mindfulness. The study investigates the influence of trait mindfulness on the ability of students to enter state mindfulness in an attempt to understand the role both types of mindfulness may have on cognitive performance.

Participants and Method

Two-hundred and five male students aged fifteen and sixteen completed the adolescent version of the Mindfulness Awareness Scale, the Cognitive Reflection Test, and the Toronto Mindfulness Scale.

Results

Hierarchical regression analysis found that state mindfulness was a predictor of cognitive reflection ability. ANOVA also found that having either trait or state mindfulness predicted higher cognitive reflection scores, but only state mindfulness had a significant effect on cognitive reflection. Trait mindfulness was not a moderating factor.

Conclusion

Both state and trait aspects of mindfulness ability influence cognitive performance. Those with higher trait mindfulness ability are better able to enter state mindfulness and thus had better cognitive reflection scores. However, where it is possible to induce state mindfulness into those with low trait mindfulness, CRT scores were also higher although not significantly so.

Responses in cognitive hierarchy games are correlated with academic performance and the cognitive reflection test

Economics and Finance undergraduate students from four cohorts played LUPI, a game rewarding the person submitting the lowest unique positive integer, for a small bonus in an exam. Some months later, they played this game again with financial incentives and took a cognitive reflection test (CRT). We find that submitted responses to different configurations of LUPI are correlated with short-term (i.e., exam grade) and medium-term (i.e., final grade and GPA) academic performance, as well as the score in the CRT.

Auditory experience modulates frontoparietal theta activity serving fluid intelligence

Children who are hard of hearing are at risk for developmental language and academic delays compared with children with normal hearing. Some work suggests that high-order cognitive function, including fluid intelligence, may relate to language and academic outcomes in children with hearing loss, but findings in these studies have been mixed and to date, there have been no studies of the whole-brain neural dynamics serving fluid intelligence in the context of hearing loss. To this end, this study sought to identify the impact of hearing loss and subsequent hearing aid use on the neural dynamics serving abstract reasoning in children who are hard of hearing relative to children with normal hearing using magnetoencephalography. We found significant elevations in occipital and parietal theta activity during early stimulus evaluation in children who are hard of hearing relative to normal-hearing peers. In addition, we found that greater hearing aid use was significantly related to reduced activity throughout the fronto-parietal network. Notably, there were no differences in alpha dynamics between groups during later-stage processing nor did alpha activity correlate with hearing aid use. These cross-sectional data suggest that differences in auditory experience lead to widespread alterations in the neural dynamics serving initial stimulus processing in fluid intelligence in children.

Executive Functions and Improvement of Thinking: An Intervention Program to Enhance Deductive Reasoning Abilities

Empirical and theoretical advances and application to society are moved at different speed. Application work is frequently developed later because it requires the integration of knowledge from different research areas. In the present paper, we integrate literature coming from diverse areas of research in order to design a deductive reasoning intervention, based on the involved executive functions. Executive functions include working memory (WM)’s online executive processes and other off-line functions such as task revising and planning. Deductive reasoning is a sequential thinking process driven by reasoners’ meta-deductive knowledge and goals that requires the construction and manipulation of representations. We present a new theoretical view about the relationship between executive function and higher-level thinking, a critical analysis of the possibilities and limitations of cognitive training, and a metacognitive training procedure on executive functions to improve deductive reasoning. This procedure integrates direct instruction on deduction and meta-deductive concepts (consistency, necessity) and strategies (search for counterexamples and exhaustivity), together with the simultaneous training of WM and executive functions involved: Focus and switch attention, update WM representations, inhibit and revise intuitive responses, and control the emotional stress yielded by tasks. Likewise, it includes direct training of some complex WM tasks that demands people to carry out similar cognitive assignment than deduction. Our training program would be included in the school curriculum and attempts not only to improve deductive reasoning in experimental tasks, but also to increase students’ ability to uncover fallacies in discourse, to automatize some basic logical skills, and to be able to use logical intuitions.

Validity and Reliability of Automatically Generated Propositional Reasoning Items

Abstract. This study introduces a newly developed public-domain multilingual automatic item generator that creates propositional reasoning (PR) items belonging to 15 item families by using various inference rules. Psychometric properties of the resulting written PR test were investigated in three diverse samples in English, simplified Chinese, and German, respectively. Internal consistency was good to excellent across samples. The ICAR16 short form test of cognitive abilities ( Condon & Revelle, 2014 ) was used to evaluate construct validity. Correlations of ICAR16 scores and PR scores were high. Furthermore, items within families appeared to be equivalent, with only minor differential item functioning between the Chinese- and English-speaking samples. Performance on the PR test was shown to be reasonably stable over the course of 1 week. Differences of total scores between test forms (pen and paper vs. computerized administration) were not detected. Findings suggest that the automatically generated PR test is a valuable instrument for the assessment of propositional reasoning ability.

Criterion Validity of Cognitive Reflection for Predicting Job Performance and Training Proficiency: A Meta-Analysis

This article presents a meta-analysis of the validity of cognitive reflection (CR) for predicting job performance and training proficiency. It also examines the incremental validity of CR over cognitive intelligence (CI) for predicting these two occupational criteria. CR proved to be an excellent predictor of job performance and training proficiency, and the magnitude of the true validity was very similar across the two criteria. Results also showed that the type of CR is not a moderator of CR validity. We also found that CR showed incremental variance over CI for the explanation of job performance, although the magnitude of the contribution is small. However, CR shows practically no incremental validity over CI validity in the explanation of training proficiency. Finally, we discuss the implications of these findings for the research and practice of personnel selection.

Arithmetic Word Problems Revisited: Cognitive Processes and Academic Performance in Secondary School

Solving arithmetic word problems is a complex task that requires individuals to activate their working memory resources, as well as the correct performance of the underlying executive processes involved in order to inhibit semantic biases or superficial responses caused by the problem’s statement. This paper describes a study carried out with 135 students of Secondary Obligatory Education, each of whom solved 5 verbal arithmetic problems: 2 consistent problems, whose mathematical operation (add/subtract) and the verbal statement of the problem coincide, and 3 inconsistent problems, whose required operation is the inverse of the one suggested by the verbal term(s). Measures of reading comprehension, visual–spatial reasoning and deductive reasoning were also obtained. The results show the relationship between arithmetic problems and cognitive measures, as well as the ability of these problems to predict academic performance. Regression analyses confirmed that arithmetic word problems were the only measure with significant power of association with academic achievement in both History/Geography (β = 0.25) and Mathematics (β = 0.23).

Gambling-Specific Cognitions Are Not Associated With Either Abstract or Probabilistic Reasoning: A Dual Frequentist-Bayesian Analysis of Individuals With and Without Gambling Disorder

BACKGROUND

Distorted gambling-related cognitions are tightly related to gambling problems, and are one of the main targets of treatment for disordered gambling, but their etiology remains uncertain. Although folk wisdom and some theoretical approaches have linked them to lower domain-general reasoning abilities, evidence regarding that relationship remains unconvincing.

METHOD

In the present cross-sectional study, the relationship between probabilistic/abstract reasoning, as measured by the Berlin Numeracy Test (BNT), and the Matrices Test, respectively, and the five dimensions of the Gambling-Related Cognitions Scale (GRCS), was tested in a sample of 77 patients with gambling disorder and 58 individuals without gambling problems.

RESULTS AND INTERPRETATION

Neither BNT nor matrices scores were significantly related to gambling-related cognitions, according to frequentist (MANCOVA/ANCOVA) analyses, performed both considering and disregarding group (patients, non-patients) in the models. Correlation Bayesian analyses (bidirectional BF10) largely supported the null hypothesis, i.e., the absence of relationships between the measures of interest. This pattern or results reinforces the idea that distorted cognitions do not originate in a general lack of understanding of probability or low fluid intelligence, but probably result from motivated reasoning.

Validation of scales for measuring factors of teaching quality from the dynamic model of educational effectiveness

Large-scale educational effectiveness research requires valid student questionnaires to assess teaching practices. This research validated eight scales for measuring teaching factors from the Dynamic Model of Educational Effectiveness (DMEE). Parallel versions of scales for measuring teaching factors in mathematics and biology were constructed and validated in two studies. In the first study, an exploratory factor analysis was conducted on data from 683 students. In the second study, the structure was cross-validated via a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) on a sample of 5,476 students. The multi-group CFA resulted in an acceptable metric invarience for all scales, indicating that the scales have comparable factor loadings. However, unsatisfactory scalar invariance suggested that the scales could not be used to compare teachers of different subjects. Testing alternative structural relations between the teaching factors did not confirm that the data fit the DMEE model adequately, although the fit parameters were better than for the alternative theoretical models. For mathematics, the external validation of the scales showed that the scales correlated with job satisfaction, external control, and teacher self-efficacy reported by the teachers. The scales are reliable and valid and could be applied to different school subjects.

Neural oscillatory dynamics serving abstract reasoning reveal robust sex differences in typically-developing children and adolescents

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A cohort of 10–16 year-olds completed an abstract reasoning task during MEG.

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Performance on the abstract reasoning task correlated with fluid intelligence.

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The task was associated with increased cortical dynamics in frontoparietal areas.

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Youth showed sexually divergent patterns of distributed cortical activity with age.

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Specific frontoparietal activity differentially predicted aspects of task behavior.

Fluid intelligence, the ability to problem-solve in novel situations, is linked to higher-order cognitive abilities, and to academic achievement in youth. Previous research has demonstrated that fluid intelligence and the underlying neural circuitry continues to develop throughout adolescence. Neuroimaging studies have predominantly focused on identifying the spatial distribution of brain regions associated with fluid intelligence, with only a few studies examining the temporally-sensitive cortical oscillatory dynamics underlying reasoning abilities. The present study collected magnetoencephalography (MEG) during an abstract reasoning task to examine these spatiotemporal dynamics in a sample of 10-to-16 year-old youth. We found increased cortical activity across a distributed frontoparietal network. Specifically, our key results showed: (1) age was associated with increased theta activity in occipital and cerebellar regions, (2) robust sex differences were distributed across frontoparietal regions, and (3) that specific frontoparietal regions differentially predicted abstract reasoning performance among males versus females despite similar mean performance. Among males, increased theta activity mediated the relationship between age and faster reaction times; conversely, among females, decreased theta mediated the relationship between age and improved accuracy. These findings may suggest that males and females engage in distinct neurocognitive strategies across development to achieve similar behavioral outcomes during fluid reasoning tasks.

Neurocognitive Signatures of Naturalistic Reading of Scientific Texts: A Fixation-Related fMRI Study

How do students gain scientific knowledge while reading expository text? This study examines the underlying neurocognitive basis of textual knowledge structure and individual readers’ cognitive differences and reading habits, including the influence of text and reader characteristics, on outcomes of scientific text comprehension. By combining fixation-related fMRI and multiband data acquisition, the study is among the first to consider self-paced naturalistic reading inside the MRI scanner. Our results revealed the underlying neurocognitive patterns associated with information integration of different time scales during text reading, and significant individual differences due to the interaction between text characteristics (e.g., optimality of the textual knowledge structure) and reader characteristics (e.g., electronic device use habits). Individual differences impacted the amount of neural resources deployed for multitasking and information integration for constructing the underlying scientific mental models based on the text being read. Our findings have significant implications for understanding science reading in a population that is increasingly dependent on electronic devices.