Hands-on Modelling with Wason Cards and Tinker Cubes: First Steps in Logical and Bayesian Reasoning in Fourth Grade

Wason cards were originally designed for an experiment evaluating subjects’ reasoning abilities. Our claim is that they may be used as an educational tool in the classroom and their didactical value is enormous. Fourth graders can be trained in logical reasoning by playing not only with four Wason cards, as in the original experiment, but with samples of them and with various contexts, e.g., with sentences about daily life and with colours instead of symbols. The transition from logical to probabilistic reasoning can be made palpable to fourth graders through ritualized games with Wason cards. Yet Wason cards have limitations, which become apparent when several features are jointly to be taken into account. For these cases, tinker cubes and tinker towers can be, as we show subsequently, adequate tools for an enactive treatment of proportional and probabilistic reasoning in fourth grade.