Q26 - Researchers gave 100 first-graders

[aileenann]

They want us to strengthen this argument. We can do so either by affirming an assumption of the argument or adding a new premise. The conclusion of the argument is that producing characters automatically saves mental space for other activities. We'll want to keep this conclusion in mind in particular when choosing an answer choice.

(A) is out of scope - we don't care about how automaticity is achieved - through practice or otherwise. We only care about what the effects of such are.
(B) looks tempting, but it is also out of scope. We care about the change during the research and not the characteristics of children before they started on the period of observation.
(C) is great because it takes the conclusion even further, showing not only that there is a relationship but that actually there is a fairly precise direct relationship.
(D) might be helpful, but not too much. There is no reason to doubt the representativeness of the group. Moreover, it's unclear that we need the group to be representative in order for the results to hold as described in the conclusion. Even if this is a somewhat quirky group of first-graders, the relationship was still shown in them. The author is not attempting to generalize beyond this group.
(E) weakens the conclusion - it almost suggests that the explanation should be reversed in terms of its directionality.

So our only colorable answer is (C) (to use a little legalese). Any questions?

[rmoncel]

Thanks for the explanation but I'm still a bit unclear.

What is the difference between answer C and the second sentence of the stimulus? To me, they convey the same information (i.e. correlation between improvement in composition skills and improvement in writing letters the most automatically).

I did not pick C because I thought simply restating a premise did not strengthen an argument.

I picked answer B, thinking that if the first-graders who showed the greatest improvement in composition skills were also the ones who wrote letters the most automatically before the start of after-school lessons, then their "pre-existing state" could be assumed to have played a role in their improvement in composition skills. How is that erroneous?

Thanks!

[aileenann]

I would call (B) out of scope in the sense that I'm not sure why I should care what prior training the students had before their session. Additionally, to the extent that (B) touches on the argument, I'd say that it just adds complexity without strengthening the argument. Indeed, it may actually weaken the argument in the sense that this suggests that it's not just the automaticity alone that is determinative. Perhaps those kids had a big improvement because they were already over the big hump of learning composition skills, etc.

(C) is subtly different from that sentence you are both pointing to. The sentence in the argument only looks at the end result, saying those who imptoved the most were those who were the most automatic. You'll notice that this is matching improvement in composition with end result in automaticity. But we don't know whether the students who wrote the most automatically did so already at the beginning of the lesson, or whether they also improved on this. That is, we don't know whether the improvement in composition was directly correlated/linked to an improvement in automaticity.

(C) links improvement in these two areas more directly saying it was those who improved at one who also improved at the either - a different claim from saying those that were good at one also improved at the other.

I hope this helps. Please follow up if you have more quesitons

[interestedintacos]

I find the explanations thus far to be inadequate.

The argument is very simple: our evidence is the fact that the highest of one category = the highest in another category. This evidence is then taken to suggest that there is a causal relationship such that being higher in one cateogry leads to being higher in another category.

So the problem with the stimulus language (the weakness we should see and look to strengthen) is that we are talking about a limited group: "those who improved the most." And from there we see a causal connection that the more of A you have, the more of B you'll have.

Think about it this way. These kids at the top (the highest in both categories) could easily just be the highest achieving kids in general. Just looking at those who improved the most in one category and seeing that they also constituted "the most" of the other category is weak because it's such a small group, and it's VERY LIKELY TO BE UNREPRESENTATIVE because it's at the top.

Think about it: Say I found out that those who improve their LSAT scores the most also are those who were able to move the quickest through LSAT sections. From this I conclude that being able to move quickly through the sections leads to score improvements (that the faster you go, essentially, the bigger score increase you'll get).
What's wrong? These people at the top are high achievers in general--they're at the highest level in both categories. What we would need to strengthen the claim is to show that the correlation actually holds among a bigger group. We would need to show that not only do those who are quickest match up with those who get the highest score increases, but that those who showed higher (not the highest) levels of speed increase received higher score improvements. Instead of just talking about the people at the very top we're now making a statement about a much bigger group. This is strengthening a key potential weakness.

If the stimulus gave us a correlation and then offered a mere restatement of the correlation just taken from a different angle as an answer choice, I don't think that could ever be a strengthener. Strengtheners don't have to strengthen that much, but in this case we are taking a super limited correlation (among a likely unrepresentative sample) and showing that it holds across a much greater group with the answer choice, so that definitely qualifies as a strengthener.

By the way, I think B is incorrect (and again the previous explanations seem inadequate to me) because it's the choice that really just restates what we already have. It's again talking about the limited category of those with the "most" improvement. In my mind it's a restatement of the second sentence. It's not wrong because it's "out of scope." It's in scope because the hypothesis of causality doesn't depend on the learning = the after-school lessons. The learning could be a different type of learning. Thinking that it would depend on it being after-school would be falling for the very common trick of assuming that just because something is mentioned in a stimulus, it holds greater importance or has a stronger connection than the argument explicitly supports or requires.

[interestedintacos]

Part of the confusion comes from misunderstanding sentence 2 of the stimulus. That statement goes both ways, not just one, so we don't need a statement going the other way as a strengthener (as I think a previous explanation was sort of suggesting).

We learn both that if you learned to write letters the most automatically you improved the most in composition, and if you improved the most in composition, you learned to write letters the most automatically. We learn essentially that these two groups are the same. It's like saying the top 1% of cancer patients is also the top 1% of cigarette buyers.

On the other hand, if I said the more cigarettes you smoke, the higher your chance of cancer, that of course doesn't mean that those with the greatest chance of getting cancer also smoke the most cigarettes. On an even intuitive level you could see that a person, for instance, exposed to radiation at extreme levels or who has a special genetic predisposition to cancer could have the greatest chance of getting cancer, and certainly they could be "the most" likely to get cancer ("the most likely" could be 1% or it could be just the 2 most likely people--all we know is it's at 'the top' but it could be 2 people or 5000).

Likewise if I told you the top 1% highest chance of cancer people also turn out to be the top 1% of cigarette smokers (or the top 5 people with highest chance of cancer also are the top 5 cigarette smokers), I can't then say the more you smoke, the higher your chance of cancer.

This is the fundamental weakness/flaw in this argument--at least that's what it seems like to me.

Maybe to make it even more clear you can see that in the stimulus "those whose composition skills had improved the most" and therefore also "learned to write letters the most automatically" could be 2 people. Those 2 people are at the top of both categories. Can we go from these 2 people to a claim that in general learning to write letters automatically leads to an improvement in composition skills? Of course not.

[jlz1202]

Very enlightening analysis, interestedintacos!

I chose D and since interestedintacoshave mentioned "unrepresentive", could any one please take a step further and explain why D incorrect? I think the conclusion is applying the causality to the general population since it does not restrict the application to the first graders and does not refer who specifically involved.

Also, by confirming the correlation between writing letters automatically and improving composition skills, is C strong enough to strongthen the causality in conclusion?

[americano1990]

Hey jlz1202

here's my take on (D) and I think you pretty much have it.
We are extrapolating the data of 100 first graders in order to make a general statement about the human kind--that greater automaticity in writing will lead to greater composition skills.
So it doesnt really matter if they are representative of the 1st graders. They could be representative of 1st, 2nd 3rd...so on high schoolers, university students, grad students...wtev so on.

The point is that the argument is not making a general statement about the first graders. If it were, and if the data were not representative of the 1st graders, that would be a problem. But make sure that in this case, we are simply using the data from 100 first graders to make a universal claim. So the only requirement I guess is that the subjects in this experiment are 'human' enough to enable us to draw a conclusion that applies to the human population.

And as for (C), remember that in this question, we have to strengthen the claim. The degree to which we can strengthen can move from 1%-100%. With regards to your question, I would not say that it strengthens the causality per se. But what it does is to expand the group in which the correlation applies so that the general conclusion that refers to humans in general would hold better. And it seems like you read 'interestedintacos''s awesome explanation, and so 'expanding the group' as i used here would be clear i think. Yea..so my answer would be that instead of directly supporting the causality, choice (C) widens the scope of the correlation cited so that we would have a stronger basis to make such causal claim.

what do you think?

[goriano]

The argument is very simple: our evidence is the fact that the highest of one category = the highest in another category. This evidence is then taken to suggest that there is a causal relationship such that being higher in one cateogry leads to being higher in another category.

Love this explanation by interestedintacos, and it reminded me of another very similar question from PT 52, LR 1, #14:

Hypothesis: Studying MORE increased a student's chances of earning a higher grade.

Observation: The students who spent the MOST time studying did not earn grades that were as high as many students who studied less.

[ericha3535]

Am I the only person who was suspicious of the new term in the conclusion?

I chose C by POE.

It says that if you learned to write the letters, then you improved on composition.

Then the conclusion goes on and say that writing more helps to free up mental resources for OTHER activities.

I was like... other activities? That's a quite of logic gap.

By reading the above posts, I get the fact that the argument is fallacious due to composition fallacy: we don't know whether these kids were already good at writing in the first place.

So... the last sentence doesn't play role or something?

[sch6les]

Part of the confusion comes from misunderstanding sentence 2 of the stimulus. That statement goes both ways, not just one, so we don't need a statement going the other way as a strengthener.

Basically, this is all you need. (B) simply repeats sentence 2. If you observe that when X is the highest, Y is the highest, then you have also observed that when Y is the highest, X is the highest. Since (B) is merely repeating a premise, it doesn't strengthen.

The conclusion states that producing more characters causes improved composition skills. Therefore, it must also be true that producing more characters is correlated with improved composition skills. (C) states this correlation. Therefore, it strengthen the argument.

[ohthatpatrick]

A lot of excellent points and observations being made here. Let me just circle back to answer a question and make a couple corrective tweaks.

- The language shift in the conclusion to "freeing up mental resources for other activities" is definitely a legit concern. Essentially, the author is assuming that 'freed up mental resources' has something to do with 'improved composition skills'.

An answer choice that addressed this gap would definitely be a contender, but none of them do (and so I think that's why people were leaving that out of the conversation). What we really get here is LSAT wanting to test us on Ye Olde 'correlation -> causality' type stuff, while throwing us a distracting language shift in the conclusion as a decoy.

- The language shift in (D) is not big enough, in my opinion, to discount it. "handwriting" seems like a mostly equivalent idea to 'lessons in handwriting' / 'learned to write letters the most automatically'. And 'composition' is a fine match for 'composition skills'.

- To me, (B) is not wrong because it restates the 2nd sentence. The 2nd sentence implies that the people whose composition skills improved the most (over the course of the after-school lessons) are the same as the people whose improved the most at writing characters automatically (over the course of the after-school lessons).

The use of those 'who had improved' and those 'who had learned' suggests to me that we are talking about measuring the change in abilities from before the lessons began to once they were complete.

(B), meanwhile, makes a correlation between people whose composition skills improved the most (over the course of the after-school lessons) and people who were already the best at writing characters automatically ( before receiving the after-school lessons).

[hyewonkim89]

Will someone kindly explain why E is not an answer?
The previous explanations on why E is not the answer isn't so clear to me. How is E weakening the argument?

Thanks in advance!

[ohthatpatrick]

To be fair, the explanations for (E) are not precisely correct. People have been suggesting that (E) portray's the argument's notion of causality in reverse, and I agree that (E) is close enough to that to make me eliminate it as an answer. However, I'll clarify later why (E) is not quite doing that.

Take another look at the conclusion and figure out what is the Cause, what is the Effect.


The author is saying that "writing characters more automatically" causes you to have "freed up mental resources for other activities".

How do we match those up with the original correlation between handwriting lessons and composition skills?

Well, "writing characters more automatically" must relate to "handwriting lessons".

So "freed up mental resources for other activities" is going to have to relate to "improved composition skills".

Hence, the conclusion is suggesting that "handwriting lessons" CAUSED "improved composition skills".

This is based on a correlation between students who wrote the letters most automatically and students who improved the most at their composition skills.

With cause and effect, we care which came first. This author thinks FIRST came the handwriting lessons, THEN came the improved composition skills.

Now look at (E).

It says that the students who had strong composition skills (BEFORE they ever got handwriting lessons), THEN showed the most handwriting improvement.

So people were suggesting reverse causality because the supposed EFFECT (strong composition skills) came BEFORE the supposed cause (handwriting lessons).

Does that make sense?

If an author claims that X causes Y, and I give you evidence that Y came before X, that weakens the author's causal story.

In reality, the answer is just irrelevant.

It's discussing students who started with STRONG composition skills.

Does the argument care about students with STRONG composition skills?

No, it specifies students who IMPROVED THE MOST at composition.

The students who IMPROVED THE MOST aren't necessarily the BEST ... in fact, they're not necessarily even GOOD.

The most improved player on your basketball team might still be the worst player. It just might be that he went from being absolutely terrible to mediocre, while all the other players went from being mediocre to decent.

If (E) were the results of the study, a more reasonable conclusion to draw would be "People who are already good at composition have the capacity to improve quite a bit at handwriting." But this is very different from the actual conclusion.

Let me know if you're still unclear.

[judaydaday]

So (b) is incorrect because the conclusion is saying that as you write more automatically, your composition skills improve proportionally. So, just looking at those who wrote the MOST automatically beforehand doesn't help show that the improvement is PROPORTIONAL to automatic writing. Is this correct?

[ohthatpatrick]

Yeah, that was well put.

The gist of this argument is that the process of learning handwriting better is what helped composition skills improve.

The kids being described in (B) were already the best at handwriting prior to the study.

They probably didn't have much ROOM to improve at handwriting, so it would be weird to think the process of working on handwriting could have benefited them much.

If these kids ALREADY wrote the most automatically, then they had the LEAST to gain from the handwriting lessons ... so if B says that these kids had the MOST significant improvement in composition, it's doesn't seem like [what they gained from handwriting lessons] would be the cause of [improving at composition].

[sepa9797]

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this question from the perspective of sufficient/necessary conditions. First of all, this question is similar to a lot of other reasoning questions in which the author attempts to explain/make a comment about an observed phenomena. The reason this question is so weird is because it's rare to see a CONDITIONAL relationship in the phenomena, let me explain...

The author states "They found that those whose composition skills had improved the most had learned to write letters the most automatically". That does not mean that the only people who had learned to write the letters the most automatically are those whose composition skills had improved the most. The latter is a sufficient condition for the former, not a NECESSARY condition. There could be other people who also learned to write letters as equally automatically.

The author comments by saying that producing characters more automatically frees up mental resources, as if the process of learning the composition skills allowed producing characters to be second nature. However, this explanation would not follow if we knew there were other people who had learned to write letters the most automatically, particularly people who have not freed up their mental resources by writing more automatically.

What answer choice C does is confirm a biconditional between those whose composition skills had improved the most and those who had learned to write letters the most automatically such that if one did write letters the most automatically then they would HAVE to be those whose composition skills had improved the most (now a necessary condition) - thereby strengthening the author's conclusion.


Thanks for reading!

[BarryM800]

I've an extra question. The argument structure is correlation to causation - the cause being "automatic character production/letter writing" and the effect "mental resources for other activities, e.g., composition skills." (C), the credited response, takes the form of "the ..., the ..." Specifically, the greater improvement in automatic letter writing, the greater improvement in composition skills. In essence, the more of the cause, the more of the effect, which provides more gradient that use of superlatives as in the premise "the most of the effect, the most of the cause," which is basically the same batch of first-graders. But I tend to think when comparatives are used, it does make a difference which comparative comes first, at least grammatically speaking. So my question is, would (C) still be the correct answer establishing a correlation, if it had stated "the first-graders who showed greater improvement in composition skills also generally showed greater improvement in their ability to write letters automatically," i.e., when it takes the form of "the more of the effect, the more of the cause"? Thanks!

[Laura Damone]

Great question, Barry!

Yes, the order of the correlated items in an answer impacts the extent to which the answer strengthens the argument.

In this argument, we've got 100 kids. Of those kids, some showed the most improvement in their composition skills: we'll call them group C. There are also kids that learned to write their letters most automatically. We'll call them group A.

The premise of the argument tells us that everyone in group C is also in group A. The conclusion posits that being in group A is the cause of getting into group C.

This type of causal conclusion, the kind that posits that one thing is the cause of another thing, is a vulnerable claim. You can attack this claim by showing either type of counterexample: the cause without the effect or the effect without the cause.

In this argument, our premise tells us that effect without cause is impossible: Everybody in group C is also in group A. But what if there were a whole bunch of A's that weren't C's? If the cause frequently existed without leading to the effect, that would weaken the causal conclusion. So to strengthen this argument, we can rule out the possibility of those instances of the cause without the effect by establishing that the A's are generally C's. That's why answer choice C is the credited answer.

In your post, you mentioned superlatives and gradients. Let's talk about superlatives first. Those are actually a distraction in this question. Answer choice C isn't correct because it shows that the correlation still holds when you downgrade the superlative from "the most" to "greater," though I see why you thought that! Answer choice C is correct because it shows that the correlation holds in both directions. The premise tells us that the effect is correlated with the cause 100% of the time: all the students in group C were also in group A. Answer choice C tells us that the cause is generally correlated with the effect: The students in group A are generally in group C. As stated above, this strengthens the argument by ruling out the possibility of a bunch of "cause without effect" counterexamples that would drag our argument down.

Now, lets talk about gradients. There are two specific types of gradient comparisons to be on the lookout for: proportional relationships and inversely proportional relationships. In a proportional relationship, a change in one thing is associated with a similar change in a second thing. As one goes up, so goes the other. As one goes down, so goes the other. In an inversely proportional relationship, a change in one thing is associated with the opposite change in a second thing. As one goes up, the other goes down, and vica versa.

Answer choice C doesn't actually express either type of gradient. It almost expresses a proportional relationship, but it falls just short because it doesn't actually guarantee that change in one thing is associated with change in the other. The word "generally" is a big red flag here. Yes, the answer tells us that greater improvement in automatic letter-writing is generally correlated with greater improvement in composition. But it doesn't actually tell us that as letter writing becomes more automatic, composition improves. It shows a point of correlation, but it doesn't show a pattern of proportional correlation that gets us to that point.

I hope this helps! There's a lot to unpack there, so let me know if you have additional questions.