The presentation investigates the development of student’s reasoning skills in primary school within the context of educational environment. The challenges of 21^st century society demand the educational system to train students’ skills beyond the basics. The development of student’s reasoning skills (as opposed to simple memorization of academic material) become particularly important in modern world.

Reasoning often defined as logical thinking ability. We operationalize the construct using the ideas of Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky, who investigated the human mental development. This approach expanded in the works of his successors – Galperin (1998), Davydov (1972, 1996), Elkonin (1989) and Nezhnov (2007).  According to Vygotsky’s theory, cognitive growth can be described as a process of internalizing culturally transmitted knowledge, which involves acquisition of generalized schemas of thinking and symbolic systems (Vygotsky, 1978; 1994).  Exposure to cultural models stimulates a gradual internal process of knowledge development. At the early stages of this process, individuals master specific procedures and associative links. At this level, their problem-solving very much relies on external characteristics of the problem; their ability to solve problems depends on how similar they are to the ones that had been directly taught.  From this level, knowledge continues to develop to a more deep-level understanding of conceptual relations underlying learned procedures and finally, to the highest level of understanding that allows a person to see the boundaries of the knowledge acquired and to be able to consider a multitude of possible relations within these boundaries. Three increasingly complex levels of mastery have been proposed: (1) procedural knowledge, (2) conceptual understanding, and (3) functional competence. Due to this taxonomy, reasoning skills refer to the second and third levels. Since the mental development goes through the acquisition of exterior experience, it is subject specific and must be examined within the subject areas.

Up to now, there have been no direct ways of assessing the different levels of mastery within the outlined theoretical framework. The assessment instrument Student Achievement Monitoring (SAM) is the first attempt to do it. SAM was designed to characterize primary school students’ knowledge (in mathematics and language) in terms of levels of mastery derived from Vygotsky’s learning theory and to capture the distinction between procedural, conceptual and functional levels of knowledge (Nezhnov, P. , 2011; Nezhnov, P., & Kardanova, E., 2011). To help separate participants into groups according to the level of their achievement benchmarks are used that reflect the three levels of the theoretical model.

Preliminary analysis of SAM test results revealed the majority of students achieve the second level of proficiency (conceptual understanding) by the end of primary school, but the third level (functional competence) is only starts to emerge.  It corresponds to the Vygotsky’s theory, which suggests that the development of the highest level of understanding of academic content proceeds after it was presented the recipient.

But we have found a big difference in test results and distribution of students among proficiency levels between different schools as well as between different classes of one school. So we explore the factors of the educational environment associated with the development of reasoning skills in language and mathematics. There are three levels of educational environment: (1) individual, (2) classroom, and (3) school. We pay special attention to the classroom and school characteristics, which may be adjusted by school or government, such as school type and learning curriculum. The teachers’ practices and beliefs are another point of interest, as they may have a significant impact to the students’ reasoning skills.

Thus, the research question is – what characteristics of educational environment support the development of reasoning skills in primary school?

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