Researches Of Characteristic Of College Students' Informal Reasoning And Its Criteria Of Measurement

According to the previous researches, the author gave a new summarization and category to the measurement criteria of informal reasoning, we accepted three measurement criteria which were put forward in previous researches and added counterargument to reason, correctness of concept representation, reasoning continuity, thinking quality and objection skills as new criteria, so there were four kinds of measurement criteria, which are criterion of informal reasoning structure, informal reasoning content, objection skills and my-side bias. In order to find out the characteristic of college students'informal reasoning and provide the criteria for the measurement and estimation of informal reasoning, we chose the college students as subjects, some of them were excellent debaters, some had no experience in debating, we chose 2 problem as experimental materials, one is related to students'everyday life, the other is social-scientific issues. Individual tests were performed. We tried to find the differences of informal reasoning between the two kinds of subjects. The results were as followed:(1) In informal reasoning process, the debaters can offer more effective reasons, but the non-debaters offered more ineffective reasons; the debaters can give more counterarguments to the arguments and reasons; There were no differences between debaters and non-debaters in the usage of qualifiers and comparing sentences.(2) The non-debaters showed significantly more concept representational mistakes and reasoning discontinuity than the debaters. The debaters'scores of thinking quality are significantly higher than that of the non-debaters.(3) For the college students, it was easy to offer alternative-based objections, but they had difficulties in offering assertion-based and argument-based objections(4) The college students gave significantly more my-side evidences than other-side evidences. There was no difference between the debaters and non-debaters in my-side bias index.(5) Debating experience and my-side bias can affect students'informal reasoning.(6) In the research, we provided some new measurement criteria for informal reasoning, which were the criterion of counterargument to reasons,correctness of concept representation, reasoning continuity, the thinking quality and objection skills. Sentence criteria, reasoning style and my-side bias were not included in the criteria of informal reasoning. So we constructed a whole new measurement criteria for informal reasoning, which including three parts, criteria of informal reasoning structure(reasoning quantity criterion, counterargument criterion); criteria of informal reasoning content(correctness of concept representation, reasoning continuity and thinking quality); criteria of objection skills(alternative assertion based , objection based objection and argument based objection).