Logical Reasoning

PT120 · S1 · Q26 Researchers gave 100 first-graders

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Researchers gave 100 first-graders after-school lessons in handwriting.

Conclusion (this suggests that)

Producing characters more automatically frees up mental resources for other activities.

Evidence

Among first-graders who got handwriting lessons, those whose composition skills improved most were those who had learned to write letters most automatically.

Evaluate

The most common argument pattern on Str / Wkn is Explain Curious Fact, and when we see we're dealing with an Experiment / Study, we're almost always going to hear about some data from the study which creates the causal mystery that our author wants to solve.

CURIOUS FACT How come the kids whose composition skills had improved the most were the same as the kids who had learned to write letters most automatically?

(you'd never guess this, but the LSAT author is about to assume that this correlation proves causation)

EXPLANATION We gave them handwriting lessons; they learned to write letters automatically. Once their handwriting became automatic muscle memory, that freed up mental resources for them to focus on what they were writing about / how they were communicating their ideas. So their composition skills improved.

Notice how much I fleshed out the causal story being implied by the conclusion. Causal conclusions often suggest a longer story than they explicitly say, so we need to take a few secs to play out the author's causal chain in our brain.

Goal

For Explain Curious Fact arguments, Strengthen questions usually increase the plausibility of the Author's Explanation, but sometimes they rule out an Alternate Explanation.

So we want more evidence that becoming more automatic with your writing frees up cognitive bandwidth for you to focus on the quality of your composition.

Or we want to rule out some alternate explanation for why the kids with the biggest uptick in automaticity also had the biggest uptick in composition skills (f.e. the kids with the most automatic handwriting were not more likely to have English tutors they worked with outside of school).

26.

Which one of the following, if true, most strengthens the argument?

Among the first-graders who received
No Impact
This explains the (rather common sense) backstory behind how the most-automatic students got to be that automatic, but it doesn't do anything to connect handwriting improvement to composition improvement, so it doesn't make the author's causal conclusion any more plausible.
3% picked this
The first-graders who wrote letters
No Impact
This weakens. The author wants to tell a story where the process of going from effortful handwriting to automatic handwriting is the causal difference maker that explains why your composition skills also improved. more automaticity >> less brainpower focused on handwriting >> more brainpower focused on the idea-writing. But this answer is saying that kids who had the best composition skills were already automatic at handwriting before the lessons began. If they were already the most automatic, then the lessons didn't change them in regards to their handwriting. It didn't take them from effortful, brain-draining handwriting to automatic brain-enabling handwriting. For the story the author is telling, at the BEGINNING of the study, these kids would have to be lower at handwriting and lower at composition skills. As the lessons improved their handwriting, that positive change is what supposedly caused the positive change in their composition skills. But if the kids were already maxed out in automaticity from the start, then the lessons didn't lead to any positive change in automaticity, so that couldn't be what explains their change in composition skills.
21% picked this
Correct
Over the course of the
Why this is right
This is an odd answer that basically improves the existing evidence. It almost feels redundant, but the original evidence was only referring to a handful of children: the ones with the most automaticity and the most composition improvement. This answer addresses the rest of the data set. So it's a bunch of new data points correlating the supposed Cause and Effect (more handwriting automaticity, more improvement in composition). Since correlations between X and Y make it more plausible that X causes Y, this is making the author's explanation more plausible by giving us more "Yes Cause, Yes Effect" data points.
Skill tested: Strengthen · how this choice captures the argument's function is the move to repeat next time.
57% picked this
Before receiving the after-school lessons
No Impact
We would only care about whether the children were representative of first-graders in general if the argument were making a sampling move and saying that "since X was true of these 1st graders, X would be true of most/all 1st graders". The conclusion looks causal; it doesn't look like it's saying the same idea from the premise but now about a wider group.
14% picked this
Among the first-graders who received
Opposite
Ideally, we see this as Opposite (if anything) because it sounds like it's saying that the good composition skills came first and the automatic handwriting came second. That would reverse the causal order of the story the author is telling, in which the automatic handwriting develops and then leads to the good composition skills.
5% picked this

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