Age and coaching effects on the reasoning performance of disadvantaged and advantaged israeli children

The nonverbal reasoning performance of Israeli advantaged and disadvantaged (N = 952) children was measured in grades 2, 4, and 6. Measurement followed the “Learning Potential” (LP) paradigm, with its three stages: pretesting, coaching in relevant problem-solving strategies, and posttesting. All results were presented in raw scores, in an attempt to assess absolute performance levels, and to present differences in terms of time gaps. The results show that all groups benefited substantially from training, but the improvement following training tended to decrease in the higher grades. In all grade levels, the disadvantaged children benefited from the coaching more than the advantaged children. The performance time gap between advantaged and disadvantaged children was about two years, with a tendency to grow with increasing age. The contribution of the coaching session in terms of absolute performance was equivalent to about two years. Posttest distributions of raw scores revealed a growing tendency toward unimodality and decreased proportions of false negatives.