Abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate the age and difficulty-related differences in children's analogical reasoning performance and reasoning processes. For this purpose, 3(age)×4(difficult-level) factorial design with a repeated measure in difficult level was used. The subjects in this study were 144 children from an elementary school in seoul. There were 48 subjects(24 males and 24 females) in each of three age group: first, third, fifth grade. The task of this study was the picture which consisted of four sets of two types of analogies. The task was presented to a subject individually. The dependent measures were analogical reasoning performance score, inference process score, mapping process score, and application process score. The: collected data were statistically analyzed in terms of two way MANOVA with one factor repeated measurement, Scheffe test, and multiple regression. The results were as follows : (1) There were significant main effects of age and difficult-level. That is, the analogical reasoning performance and each component process increased with age, while the performance and the processes decreased with difficult-level. (2) There were significant interaction effects between age and difficult-level in analogical reasoning performance, in inference process, and also in mapping process. However, in application process, there wasn't any significant interaction effect between age and difficult-level. (3) The correlation between the analogical reasoning performance and each of three component processes were significant. Also, in terms of coefficients, application- and inference process predicted analogical reasoning performance well regardless of difficult level, while the predictor based on mapping process increased with difficult-level. Thus the mapping process seems to play an important role in difficult task.