Preservice Elementary Teachers’ Understanding of Logical Inference

This article reports on the logical reasoning efforts of five prospective elementary school teachers as they responded to interview prompts involving nonsense, natural, and mathematical representations of conditional statements. The interview participants evinced various levels of reliance on personal relevance, linguistic contextualization, and time-dependent interpretation in working through reasoning tasks. Different kinds of affective and cognitive demands, dependent on personal history, may be needed for the depersonalization, decontextualization, and detemporalization required by abstract logico-deductive reasoning. Implications for college instruction with future elementary school teachers include suggestions for logical argument analysis activities aimed at enriching learners’ reasoning situation images.