Reading and formal thinking in Quebec high school students

According to Piaget, the development of formal thinking is one of the primary tasks of adolescence. Reading is also a developmental task. The failure of adolescents to develop formal thinking skills and increasing levels of illiteracy led the investigators to conduct a pilot study to see whether there is a correlation between high school students' scores on a test of formal thinking and those on a test of reading. Students' success on both tests was disappointingly low. Lack of motivation seems to be a major problem, and requires further investigation. Correlations between scores on the two tests were relatively low, although there is a suggestive similarity between the distribution of scores for formal thinking and those for vocabulary. General success on visual exercises suggests that graphic methods using computer-assisted instruction may be useful for developing formal thinking skills of adolescents.