Schooling and the development of transitive inference.

Because it is impossible to experiment with school attendance, the erect of formal education as opposed to chronological age on the development of transitive inference has never been investigated empirically. A recent quasi-experimental paradigm, which allows for disentangling the net erects of age and schooling, can help overcome this difficulty. The paradigm is applied to the estimation of the independent erects of age and schooling in Grades 5 and 6 on raw scores obtained in a 3-term series test. Results point to schooling as a major factor underlying the increase of scores as a function of age