Page No 105-116
Rini Elsa Jacob and Sudhin Karuppali
Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Manipal
Verbal reasoning is a form of inductive reasoning skills, comprising of planning, prediction, constructive thinking, problem solving, and hypothesis. These skills are found to play a major role in school-going children, helping them in the better understanding of new topics that have been introduced by teachers. Thus, the present study aimed to measure the development of verbal reasoning skills in developing Indian adolescents between 10-16 years of age. Ninety-six regular school going adolescents were included and were divided into 6 groups based on their age varying with one-year age intervals. The study consisted of 3 phases – Phase I comprised of the development of the stimuli (fable) including the multiple-choice probe questions; phase II included the task administration on each of the participants across the 6 groups; while phase III involved the data and statistical analysis. Parametric analysis was done to determine the level of significance across the groups and between the age groups. The results of one-way ANOVA revealed a significant difference (p<0.05) across the age groups for the verbal reasoning skills. Post hoc results indicated a statistically significant difference (p<0.05) between the 10-11-year-olds and 12-13-year-olds for the overall development of verbal reasoning skills. Thus, verbal reasoning skills exhibit a developmental trend in adolescents, which begins to achieve a plateau from 13 years of age