Examining Gifted Primary School Students’ Logical Reasoning Ability

Abstract

Gifted students have advanced creative, analytical, critical, and logical reasoning skills. Logical reasoning is different from other thinking skills. The logical reasoning skill, which is also a high-level thinking skill and required for other high-level thinking skills, has also been the subject of many studies. However, it has been observed that there are not enough studies on the logical reasoning skills of gifted students. In this study, the logical reasoning levels of gifted primary school students will be analyzed. The research was designed according to the descriptive survey model, one of the quantitative research methods. The sample of the study consists of 38 primary school students in a center where gifted students are educated. The Longeot's Test of Cognitive Development was used as a data collection tool. Frequency and percentage distributions and non-parametric analysis methods were used in the analysis of the data. None of the gifted primary school students got full marks on the test. While none of the gifted primary school students could get full points from the questions belonging to the formal operational period, only 3 students got full points from the questions belonging to the concrete processing period. While the cognitive development level of 26 gifted primary school students is in the formal operational stage, the cognitive development of 12 students is in the concrete operational stage. According to the gender variable of gifted primary school students, there is no statistically significant difference between the mean scores of the concrete and formal operational periods. There is a statistically significant difference in favor of male students in the mean scores of combinatorial analysis problems.