Abstract
Sato and Kudo (2015) analyzed the reasoning process of university students classifying a unique quadrangle in which three vertices are located along a straight line. The results indicated that it was difficult for the students to develop a reasoning from the hypothetical judgment and that there was a self-contained reasoning for which the starting point of inference originated only in intuitive judgment. The present study reconsidered the difficulty of hypothetical judgment as a problem of “non-use of knowledge for unknown cases” and investigated whether teaching university students about the instrumental aspects of knowledge would suppress self-contained reasoning and facilitate problem solving. The results indicated that the above process promoted application of the rule to classification tasks of the quadrangle and that the effect was equivalent to that where the hypothetical judgment was established (Sato and Kudo, 2021). This suggests that a general perception of the instrumental aspects of knowledge can be formed and that it increases the applicability of the rule to novel cases.
https://ror.org/03qg42k57 
