This is a neat idea and I wish Ian O'Byrne had added more examples to his short article or perhaps done a search to find examples where the same thing is applied elsewhere (it matches the oft-cited example from Sesame Street, "which of these things does not belong?", though I confess, other examples are hard to find). The idea is to present children with a scenario (or adults, with more complex scenarios) and to ask them, "what's the rule?" I would also ask, "what's the pattern" or as in the Sesame Street case, "what's the classification scheme?" The idea is to get people to derive their own rules (patterns, classifications, etc) as practice for new environments when pre-existing rules (etc) might not have been previously defined. And I would extend this along the line of my own critical literacies principles, asking (for example) "what is being valued here?" or "what inference is the person making?" or "how would we describe the logic of change being applied here?" Because, you know, in all reasoning, recognition precedes critique.
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