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Studies have shown that people not only fail to form more
than one initial hypothesis in inductive reasoning, but also
exhibit a strong confirmation bias in hypotheses testing. The
purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of
collaborative learning, giving explanation, and guiding
questions on learning inductive reasoning. One hundred and
sixty-one undergraduate students of National Chiao Tung
University were randomly assigned to one of the 2 (collaborative
vs. individual learning) x 2 (explanation vs. no explanation) x
2 (guiding vs. no guiding questions) experimental situations to
work on 6 inductive reasoning tasks similar to Wason''s 2-4-6
task. At the practice and the learning phase, subjects in
collaborative condition worked in pairs. At the testing phase,
all subjects were tested individually. Results showed that
collaborative experience indeed led to higher accuracy, greater
satisfaction, and higher confidence in inductive reasoning, both
at the learning and the testing phase. Subjects who were asked
to provide explanations to their reasoning behaviors were, on
the other hand, found to generate more alternative hypotheses,
use more instances to test their hypotheses, also use higher
proportion of falsifying instances and, of course, higher
accuracy at the testing phase. Furthermore, giving explanation
also effectively lowered the strong overconfidence tendency
exhibited by subjects in no explanation conditions.
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