Development level of engineering students’ inductive thinking

Abstract

In Hungary, the rate of drop-out in technical higher education, exceeds the average of the European Union. The affective, sociological and socio-economic factors hiding behind the reasons have already been examined by several researches, however, less attention has been paid to the students’ cognitive deficiencies although inductive reasoning is of decisive importance in gaining knowledge e.g. in mathematics and natural sciences. Based on these findings, the object of this research, was on one hand to describe the development level of the inductive reasoning and thinking of students starting their studies in technical higher education, and on the other hand, to prove or disprove the correlation between the task solution time and the result achieved in the inductive test. The research implemented by means of an online test involved 253 students; of the components of inductive thinking, we examined the development level of abstract, analogue and diagrammatic thinking.