By: Megan Prats

8/7/2014

The laws of Science, Economics, Music, etc. were all derived from inductive reasoning. Inductive reasoning is when the student uses her critical thinking skills to infer a law or rule about a discipline from a set of information. Inductive reasoning is the newest addition to the 2learn® Method’s list of elements of critical thinking.

Below is an example of a student who performs inductive reasoning:

You are reviewing gender properties amongst nouns and adverbs in Spanish with the student. The student sees that when the noun is masculine, the adverb ends in “o”. However, when the noun is feminine, the adverb ends in “a”. Thus, she concludes that masculine adverbs end in “o” and feminine adverbs end in “a” in Spanish.

The benefits of inductive reasoning are that the student can apply rules to her problem-solving endeavors without having to memorize all of the current ones. With inductive reasoning, the student literally derives them on the spot. Now her conclusions are always subject to error as those who’ve formally derived these rules have a better idea as to what they are holistically because they have a broader understanding of the discipline. Because you are the expert in the discipline, if you see that the student’s extracted rule is partial or incorrect, you can still reward her for inductive reasoning (as long as the inductive reasoning is sound) because she completed the process, but make sure to inform the student as to where she is lacking in her rule.

You must be cautious with inductive reasoning as students like to extract rules that are unconditionally applicable because they don’t have to think as much to solve the problem. However, since reality functions in a wide-variety of ways, make sure to explain to the student that there can always be exceptions to her rule. Thus, when she is applying what she extracted to solving a problem, she will approach it with a more flexible viewpoint as opposed to a black and white viewpoint.