Fundamental study of the reasoning in children with Learning Disability

2022 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 19K14280
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Early-Career Scientists
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Review Section: Basic Section 09060:Special needs education-related
• Research Institution: Hokkaido University of Education
• Principal Investigator: Tsutamori Eishi 北海道教育大学, 教育学部, 准教授 (60708478)
• Project Period (FY): 2019-04-01 – 2023-03-31
• Keywords: 限局性学習症 / 類推 / 推論

Outline of Final Research Achievements

This is a basic study of the inferential function (analogy), which is also within the definition of specific learning dysorder. Analogy is one of the reasoning frameworks that extracts similarities between past experiences (base) and current tasks (target) and applies knowledge (mapping). It has been considered important to be able to focus on the similarities between the base and target in order to successfully apply analogy. However, the results of this study show that the degree of similarity extraction does not contribute to the success of the analogy. Participants with lower scores on tasks requiring logical thinking were more successful at analogies. It is possible that participants with higher scores on the task requiring logical thinking were less able to apply knowledge from the base task because they focused their attention only on the target task and were unable to diffuse their attention.

Free Research Field

認知心理学/発達心理学/神経心理学/特別支援教育

Academic Significance and Societal Importance of the Research Achievements

基本問題を学習しても、類題や応用問題に知識を適用できない子どもは少なくない。そのような学習上の課題に直面している子どもは、発達性ディスレクシア(DD)とは別の枠組みで躓きの要因を検討することが重要である。本研究は類推機能に着目し、基礎的な研究を行なった。将来的に学習の躓きの要因を検討する１つの切り口になる可能性があり、社会的に意義がある。また従来の類推研究では類似性の抽出の程度が類推の成功に寄与すると考えられていたが、それを支持する結果は得られなかった。一方で、論理的思考の高さが類推を妨げる結果が示された。この結果は類推を成功させるメカニズムを検討する上で重要な知見であり学術的に意義がある。