| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立屏東師範學院 === 教育科技研究所 === 91 === The purposes of this study were to develop a program which aimed at enhancing children’s analogical reasoning ability, to examine the effects of the program on the analogical ability of a group of third graders, and to investigate the interactive effects between instruction and intelligence.
Using a quasi-experimental design, three classes in grade three were randomly selected from an elementary school in Kaohsiung City. There were 88 students participated in this study. Each of the three classes was randomly assigned to either the instructional group, practice group or control group. Students in the instructional group received a two week long instruction on analogical reasoning for three times a week. Students in the practice group were given the same sets of questions of analogical reasoning for practicing, and students in the control group neither received the instruction nor were given questions for practicing. Before and after the experiment, the three groups of students took analogical reasoning pretest, immediate post-test and delayed post-test. Also, students’ CPM IQ score were acquired from school administers.
The major findings were as follows：
A. The effects of the program
1. The students in the instructional group performed significantly better than those in the practice group and the control group in the posttest of analogical reasoning. Also, the students in the instructional group scored significantly higher in the follow-up posttest of analogical reasoning than students in the control group. The better performance of the instructional group comes from the higher scores is in the subtest of the graphic analogical reasoning.
2. The students in the instructional group performed significantly better than the practice group and the control group in the posttest of analogical problem solving.
B. The changes in students’ analogical reasoning after the treatment
1. After the instruction, the frequency of correct reasoning on the traditional analogical reasoning questions of the instructional group increased significantly, and the frequency of different kinds of incomplete reasoning decreased, especially in “neither complete inference nor mapping”.
2. After the instruction, no changes were found in the instructional group’s reasoning on the problem solving questions.
C. The interactive effects between the instruction and intelligence
1. The students of lower intelligence in the instructional group had higher scores in the traditional analogical reasoning test than the students of lower intelligence of the practice group and control group, while there was no difference among the students of higher intelligence in the three treatment groups.
2. No significant interaction was found between the experimental treatment and level of intelligence in analogical problem-solving test.
D. The students in the instructional group reported positive attitudes towards the program.
Based on the findings of the study, suggesting for teachers and future research were discussed.
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