#21 - At a large elementary school researchers studied

[ready2bdone]

Please help with question #21 on October 2015. I just can not come to see how answer choice ,C is right.

[David Boyle]

Please help with question #21 on October 2015. I just can not come to see how answer choice ,C is right.

Hello ready2bdone,

I assume you mean #21 from section 4 of that test. --Anyway, answer C gives an alternate reason why the kids' scores might have improved: maybe they were trying hard to raise their grades to get onto the chess team, instead of the chess course somehow making them smarter.

Hope this helps,
David

[tamarisk]

But is not answer D detailing the same kind of answer but with a stronger reason the children would not need to take the course and still do well in other intellectual areas. Frankly, I thought both answers, though the best two, were weak answers with too much implications and holes in each. When I look at D, I think saying the next year the children is not helping answer how they did that previous year at school after taking after-
school programs and I understand the answer does not explain what kind of achievments. But, answer C does not explain in any way how it weakened the argument, namely other intellectual activities. Just because the answer states many in the program went onto involving themselves in the chess team does not mean the program may have helped or not helped. Now when I look at answer C again, it mentions how students need a high grade average for membership, which to me makes the answer all that more confusing. Is it implying that these "many" students already had high average scores before taking the program or after?

[Emily Haney-Caron]

Hi tamarisk,

The difference here between C and D is that C gives an alternate reason why the kids in the program would have improved their performance; D gives information about kids who did not complete the program. As a result, D is irrelevant here; we're concerned with the kids who did complete the program. C is saying that there is an alternative reason (other than the power of chess) for the students' performance: they were working hard to improve their grades so they could make the team. Hope that helps!

[Ratphilip]

Hi. Still having trouble with answer choice D. I realize it does not refer to the subset addressed in the stimulus (children who have completed course) but at the same time, The conclusion does not have to do with the program.

The way i see the argument is: Kids did a chess program-> kids got better at schoolwork -> chess helps improve school work.

An alternative explanation could be that any program (chess, basketball, knitting, etc) helps them with school work. D basically provides that by saying there is an alternate way to improve school work-> a study session program.

I guess part of my question is are you saying that we could have gotten to C simply by recognizing ABDE don't reference the relevant subset? Or is there a way to tune D to undermine the conclusion or make it a correct answer?

Thanks

[Jonathan Evans]

Hi, Ratphilip,

Great question. Consider your analysis. While it is true that there may be other ways to improve achievement levels, the facts contained in Answer Choice (D) in no way undermine the contention that the skills exercised in chess-playing also improve achievement levels. Answer Choice (D) just shows that there might be other ways to achieve the same effect.

To claim that it's not the reasoning power and spatial skill that are relevant for improvement but that it's just doing something/participating in an activity that helps requires you to introduce additional assumptions, that is, you need to bring in a couple suppositions of your own.

For example, if we knew that:

1. Other children doing another program improved as well, AND
2. It's actually not reasoning and intuition that matter, only participating in an activity,

then we could surmise that we have a weaker argument. Notice however that statement 2 above creates a bit of a circular argument. We're assuming that it's some other quality that matters and not the reasoning and spatial skills, therefore it's not the reasoning and spatial skills.

To sum up, the best answer to most strengthen and weaken questions will directly address the validity of the conclusion by dealing with an implicit assumption. When we need to bring in additional assumptions, we create too much distance between the information in the answer choice and the conclusion.

I hope this helps!

[NeverMissing]

Can you help explain how answer choice C weakens the argument's conclusion that the reasoning power of chess help students improve in other areas of achievement?

It seems entirely possible from answer choice C that chess COULD IN FACT contribute to other areas of achievement, and yet simultaneously, the students were all trying to gain membership to a school chess team that requires high grades. I don't see how their pursuit of this membership, and thus high grades, weaken the argument. Couldn't the reasoning power of chess provide all the benefits to the students that the argument grants, even though the students' primary goal is to achieve high grades to get on the chess team?

It seems that this answer choice attacks the motivations of the students, giving them an alternate reason for doing so well in other areas of achievement. But unlike other weaken questions, this answer choice does not seem to affect the conclusion in any way. Maybe every single student that completed the chess program had as their only motivation getting higher grades in order to join the school chess team. But that does not rule out the possibility that the reasoning power and spatial intuition of chess helped contribute to their increase in achievement levels.

Maybe without the program, the students would still have increased their achievement levels in order to get into the chess club. But there is no indication from the argument or the answer choice that their motivation to achieve higher levels of achievement was not helped or enhanced with the program. For example, without the program, maybe the student's achievement raises by 25%. But with the program, their achievement raises 50%. Answer choice C still allows for this possibility, which actually would lend strength to the argument.

Ultimately, I am having difficulty seeing how the students' motivation to make high grades to join a club is mutually exclusive from their having derived a benefit in achievement levels due to the chess program. One does not preclude the other.

[AthenaDalton]

Hi NeverMissing,

You're correct that one explanation (seeking higher grades to qualify for the chess team) does not preclude the other (chess improving intellectual ability) from being true.

The important thing to note here is that this is a weaken question -- so any answer choice that makes the speaker's conclusion less likely to be true, even if it only weakens it a tiny bit, will be the correct answer.

This prompt uses cause and effect reasoning:

Cause Effect
Playing chess Improvement in Schoolwork

One way to weaken this causal relationship is by showing an alternate cause for the stated effect. So the alternate cause proposed in answer choice (C), that students were trying to improve their grades to qualify for an exclusive school team, does exactly that. It gives us an alternate cause effect relationship:

Cause Effect
Trying to Raise GPA to Qualify for Chess Team Improvement in Schoolwork

Since this weakens the cause / effect relationship just a little bit, it's the right answer. Remember that "weakening" an argument isn't the same as totally eviscerating it. Even weakening it a small amount is enough for this type of question.

I hope this helps! Good luck studying!

-Athena Dalton

[lkr123]

Can someone please explain why answer B is incorrect? I thought that if the kids who completed the program had higher preprogram levels of achievement than the kids who did not complete it, then it shows that the kids who did the program were already getting higher grades rather than the chess program improving their grades.

[Luke Haqq]

Hi lkr123!

To see why (B) doesn’t work, consider the conclusion of the argument. The conclusion is that the reasoning skills involved in playing chess play a causal role in contributing to achievement in other intellectual areas. Answer (B) doesn’t address the conclusion about a causal relationship between chess-playing and improvement in other areas.

(B) is making a comparison between people who completed the program and people who didn’t. If the people who completed the program were getting higher grades preprogram than those who didn’t complete the program, it would still be the case that they “showed a significant increase in achievement levels in all of their schoolwork” after the chess program. In other words, there’d still be a post-chess-program increase in abilities (even if they had higher preprogram grades than those who dropped out)—so (B) doesn’t get to the causal relationship in the conclusion.