Practicing abductive reasoning: The correlations between cognitive factors and learning effects

Abstract The game design for students to practice reasoning skills is very important for improving learning effectiveness. To date, abductive, inductive and deductive reasoning are considered as equally important for developing students’ thinking skills, but only a few games have been designed for students to practice abductive reasoning. Thus, in this study, we designed a game named V-aquarium for junior high school students to practice abduction while learning science knowledge. To explore the effectiveness of the gameplay, using abductive reasoning, we attempted to understand the correlations between epistemic curiosity, cognitive fatigue, perceived learning value, and gameplay progress. A total of 307 valid data were collected for confirmatory analysis. The results revealed that two types of epistemic curiosity (interest-type and deprivation-type) were negatively related to cognitive fatigue but were positively related to the perceived learning value of gameplay (PLVG); cognitive fatigue was not significantly related to gameplay progress but was positively associated with the perceived learning value of gameplay. The implication of this study is that teachers could use V-aquarium to input the learning content they have taught for students to practice abduction in order to enhance their science knowledge learning.