Enhancing Secondary School Students’ Acquisition of Correlational Reasoning Skills

Abstract

Although correlational reasoning problems are frequently encountered in a variety of school and out of school situations, student acquisition of the requisite skills is incomplete under conditions of existing instruction. An innovative instructional programme was developed and implemented in 12 grade 9/10 classrooms using a delayed treatment design. The study found that performance on a multivariate correlational task increased substantially; the average treatment student scored higher than 99% of those in the control condition. The impact of the programme was mediated by teacher commitment to improving students’ correlational reasoning skills and by teacher efficacy. The programme was less successful in developing students’ ability to draw conclusions from correlational data, a finding that diminished optimism about real life applications.