Q15 - In one study, engineering students

[SchneiderME01]

Step 1: Identify the question type I believe that this is a Principle conforms to reasoning question

Step 2: Identify Premise and Conclusion

I believe the conclusion is " one should not always purchase technologically advanced educational tools"

The Premise I believe has two parts

1. Engineering students who prepared for an exam by using toothpicks and string did not worse than similar students who prepared by using an expensive computer with sophisticated graphics
2. Military personnel who trained on a costly high-tech simulator performed no better on a practical exam than did similar personnel who trained using an inexpensive cardboard model

So I want to find an answer choice the mentions something from both the premise and the conclusion...

So looking at the answer choices...

A) Seems out of scope the conclusion is about high tech. versus Low tech not military v. engineering
B) this seems to have too narrow of a focus (only on high tech) and the arguement dosen't address implementation so it appears out of scope on this account as well
C) Makes a comparison which dosen't exist in the argeument

D) the right answer but I don't understand why?
E) The answer I choose which is wrong and I don't understand why...

[timmydoeslsat]

You have correctly identified the conclusion and its support.

The premises tells us of situations where students that studied with expensive/high-tech material did not perform better than students with inexpensive/low-tech material.

The conclusion is that one should not always purchase technologically advanced education tools.

And we are asked to provide a principle that helps to justify that conclusion of should.

As you noticed, this conclusion does not necessarily follow. We see that the materials are not helping the students perform better, but that does not equate to not purchasing them.

There is a jump there.

A) Way off. This gets into different tools for different subject matter.
B) This says: high-tech solutions to modern problems are effective ---> implemented knowledgeable personnel

Clearly not what we want at all in helping justify the idea that one should not always buy high tech teaching tools.

C) Way off. This says that a lot of spending for nonmilitary is at least as justified. In no way gets us to the idea of not always buying high tech teaching tools.

D) If there are tools less expensive or at least as effective ---> One should not invest in expensive teaching aids

This works. This gives us justification for not always buying high tech teaching tools. The premises given in the argument give us justification to say that we have met the sufficient condition of this principle. This leads us to one should not invest.

E) One should always provide students with a variety of teaching tools. This does not help us with one should not always purchase high tech. This allows for us to still buy all high-tech! Plus this answer choice gets into left field about students learning style that is irrelevant in this argument.

[ohthatpatrick]

Great response. Let me reinforce a couple structural points he mentioned.

We can predict our answer on these Princ. Justify questions in the form of
Prem --> Conc

Our premises portrayed lo-fi educational tools working as well as hi-fi educational tools. Our conclusion says "we should not always purchase the hi-fi tools"

Our predicted answer:
Lo-fi works as well as hi-fi --> don't purchase the hi-fi

You can hopefully see how (D) is set up as a conditional statement, with one half paraphrasing the evidence and the other half paraphrasing the conclusion.

I often judge the answers to these Princ-Just questions initially on the basis of whether they would help me prove what my Conclusion says.

Does (A) give me a rule that would prove I "should not always purchase technologically advanced educational tools"?

No. In fact, the only answers that have language that matches our conclusion are (C) and (D).
(Technically, the language of (C) does not match our conclusion, but it looks close enough to deserve closer inspection)

Down to those two, we can discriminate which is correct by analyzing which one of them better matches the premise half of our desired answer.

Was our premise focused on comparing military vs. nonmilitary, as (C) suggests, or was our premise focused on whether other teaching tools were less expensive and as effective, as (D) suggests?

[clearly a rhetorical question, since we know the correct answer]