Reasoning skills are part of our everyday lives. It is imperative for children to be taught these things at a young age for many reasons. Children’s minds are like sponges, they are going to soak up everything when they are young. Wouldn’t you want your child to soak up essential material that they can use in future scenarios throughout life? Making sound decisions and logical judgments I would think would be at the top of every parent’s list for their children in early onset learning.
Basic reasoning skills are broken down into four major building blocks. These skills include storage, retrieval, matching, and finally execution skills. Looking at these skills one at a time help us really grasp the concept of reasoning skills in a whole.
Storage skills are defined as the ability to transfer information into long term memory and back out again. This is where new things learned are understood and also placed in combination of things already learned. These skills are particularly helpful in future years as a student while learning new and revised information, and combining this new information with already known information.
Matching skills is just that. It helps the learner determine and break down new information and how to place it with similar information in long term memory. There are five different types of matching skills that touch on different ways matching is executed throughout the brain.
Retrieval skills are very similar to storage skills in where it helps determine how to transfer and how to retrieve or “remember” set information.
And finally we have execution skills which deal primarily in coordinating other skills taught and how to structure or build new thinking patterns. This will also come in handy in future scenarios such as furthering education and learning job skills.
Clearly, learning basic reasoning skills at an early age will help anyone achieve long term goals, and starting children out early in the process where they still have many years of schooling ahead will benefit greatly from this lesson. Many examples and further information about basic reasoning skills are found in this external website. Reasoning Information I am also including an image showing the different branches for each of the four basic reasoning building blocks to indicate which skill sets have more steps to them and what those steps are. That image is seen below.
In closing, I find that basic reasoning skills are definitely needed for children’s success in their day to day lives. I think these skills should be taught in school, and I believe they already are. Children need to have all the ammunition they can to succeed in today’s world, and getting these basic building blocks taught at an early age is crucial. It’s a great idea that I fully support.
