Pedagogical principles favouring the development of reasoning in people with severe learning difficulties

Abstract

To understand the world around, to adapt oneself to and act on one’s environment requires inductive reasoning skills, a principle component of intelligence. People with severe learning difficulties are characterised by their incapacity to access this type of reasoning. However, it is possible to foster inductive reasoning by acting specifically on the cognitive processes involved. Several pedagogical principles that allow the development or (partial) compensation for such processes are presented. Their application within the framework of the validation process of the Analogical Reasoning Learning Test (ARLT) showed that this approach contributed to a genuine development of inductive reasoning in a large part of the group of participants.