Where Are We Now: Effect-studies and the Rise of Diversity in Philosophy for Children


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Where Are We Now? Effect-studies and the Rise of Diversity 

in Philosophy for Children  

Pieter Mostert 

“I like the scientific spirit—the holding off, the being sure but not too sure, the willingness to 
surrender ideas when the evidence is against them: this is ultimately fine—it always keeps the way 
beyond open—always gives life, thought, affection, the whole man, a chance to try over again after a 
mistake—after a wrong guess.”  

-Walt Whitman

et me start with a lengthy quotation from Lipman’s manifesto “Where we are now” (Lipman, 
1986), claiming that enough research has been done to assert that Philosophy for Children1 
has a positive effect on ‘higher order thinking’. 35 Years later, I want to add a question mark 

and ask, “Where are we now?” In my attempt to answer this question, I will focus on three issues that 
have been raised over the years and that keep returning in conversations about whether, as an 
international community, we are doing the research we should do: (1) although commonly named 
‘Philosophy for Children’, there is a wide variety in the actual ‘programmes’ that students are involved 
in; (2) in most effect-studies only a rudimentary description is given of the actual teaching and 
learning activities; (3) there is a wide variety in understandings of philosophy. A critical analysis of 
these issues leads me to a set of recommendations for effect-studies in the near future.2 

Back to 1986 

In 1986 Matthew Lipman opened his overview of “where we are now” with a manifesto: 

The National Assessment of Educational Progress has urged that ‘higher order thinking 
skills’ of American students be systematically and significantly strengthened. Likewise, the 
Rockefeller Commission on the Humanities has emphasized that elementary and 
secondary education must focus upon the building of conceptual skills and must 
simultaneously intensify and enrich student awareness of our cultural heritage. The 
Philosophy for Children program helps meet both these needs by fostering the 
improvement of reasoning skills, starting with the early elementary grades, and by having 
children engage in logical dialogue with regard to such traditional philosophical concepts 
as ‘right’, ‘fair’, ‘good’ and ‘true’. 

1For Lipman, “Philosophy for Children” refers to the programme as developed at his Institute for the Advancement of 
Philosophy for Children (IAPC) at Montclair State University. In this article I use it as a generic term. 
2 In this article I focus on effect-studies of the cognitive domain, because the outcomes of these studies are commonly used 
as the evidence that Philosophy for Children brings clear benefits for the students involved. 

L 



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The success of Philosophy for Children in meeting these objectives is reported upon here. 
Its effectiveness as a tool for improving various aspects of cognitive performance, including 
reasoning ability and ideational creativity, is evidenced on a variety of measures of skills. 
‘Higher order thinking’ is confirmed as being not only a definite feature of early childhood 
cognition, but also as one that can be taught by this particular method. Improvements in 
academic performance, moreover, suggest that the program is indeed a vital component of 
humanities education. Furthermore, the improvements generated in reasoning by way of 
philosophical inquiry are shown to have their impact ‘across the disciplines’ at an early age. 
(p. 32) 

 
The Success of the Philosophy for Children Programme 

 

The international community has embraced Lipman’s manifesto. There is a widely received 
view, that by now enough research has been done in order to claim that Philosophy for Children has a 
positive effect on the cognitive abilities across the disciplines. Tricky and Topping summarise this view 
in their systematic review of research: “Unlike many educational methods, P4C has relatively good 
quality and quantity of evidence for effectiveness” (Trickey and Topping, 2004, p. 377). The acronym 
P4C—currently replaced by P4wC, emphasising the ‘for’ and the ‘with’ equally—is understood to refer 
to the Philosophy for Children “programme”. Effect-studies focus on the “effectiveness of Philosophy 
for Children programmes”; see for example Yan, Walters, Wang and Wang (2018). This way of 
speaking is not so much of a problem in a single study: “the programme” refers to the intervention as 
described in the research report. But what if a good number of reports show evidence of effectiveness, 
but refer to interventions which display a wide variety in the content and implementation of “the 
programme”? What can we conclude then? 

 
The introduction of a Philosophy for Children programme in a school is a complex 

intervention. It consists of a whole ‘package’ of changes in the usual routines of a particular school: 
new study materials, new learning activities, new classroom arrangements, new kinds of interaction 
among students and between students and teachers, new teachers or newly trained teachers, presence 
of researchers and visitors from other schools, interviews, and questionnaires, pre- and post-tests, 
newsletters, and social media posts for sharing experiences. Philosophical dialogues don’t end at the 
end of the class. The introduction of Philosophy for Children creates a web of changes, of which some 
will have a bigger impact than others, depending on the specific context of a particular school. In this 
multitude of changes, it is not more than reasonable to ask the question: What is it that makes 
Philosophy for Children ‘effective’? 

 
Today’s reality is that there is a wide variety of views and practices, and that only a minor part of 

these practices is covered by Matthew Lipman’s description in 1986, quoted above, that we facilitate 
“logical dialogue(s) with regard to traditional philosophical concepts”. Over the years, the emphasis on 
formal reasoning skills (as shown and practised in Lipman’s Harry Stottlemeier’s Discovery) has 
shifted towards a broader approach of communicating, questioning and (higher order) thinking skills. 
This development in the international community of Philosophy for Children can be characterised as 
a shift of focus from drawing inferences to constructing arguments. So far, this has not led to a new 
kind of homogeneity of practice, as I will demonstrate later. For effect-studies the absence of such a 



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homogeneity constitutes a problem in the case of comparing studies which measure a certain effect 
but refer to different practices (‘interventions’), which have caused this effect. 

 
Measuring Effectiveness 

 
Overall, there were only a few high-quality studies that fulfil the indicators of quality in this 
study to support the effectiveness of P4C. Therefore, there is still much room for research 
to shed light on stronger evidence about the effectiveness of the programme. (Ventista, 
2017, p. 459) 
 

Two Obstacles 

 

Ventista’s “stronger evidence” is within reach when we are able to solve two issues. One has already 
been mentioned above: the variety of what students are actually doing under the umbrella of “the 
Philosophy for Children programme”. The key-question here is: what constitutes a philosophical 
enquiry? Two different answers, each representing a widely shared view within the international 
community, can exemplify this variety. Tricky and Topping (2004) answer the question with “a 
routine classroom philosophical enquiry in terms of nine steps” (p. 369; for a more elaborate 
exposition of their view, see Topping, Tricky and Cleghorn, 2019). McCall and Weijers (2017), on the 
contrary, defend “the primacy of philosophy”, as they call it: 
 

The side benefits of practising philosophising, such as developing communications skills, 
listening skills, patience, tolerance of difference, and respect for others, could all be 
achieved in other ways. But we propose that the deep understanding of what underlies 
individual and collective human life can only be achieved by philosophising. It is our 
experience that internationally the emphasis in pwc [Philosophy with Children] has shifted 
from the core benefits of philosophising to attention to the side benefits. And we think 
that the loss of the primacy of philosophy in pwc is a huge loss for the children. (p. 91) 
 

The lesson to be learned here for future effect-studies is, as Oyler (2019) recommends, to provide 
detailed information about, as he calls it, the “dosage” of activities: in which kinds of activities were 
the students (and teacher) involved and to which intensity? Such information would clarify what in a 
particular study is meant by “the programme.” 
 

The other obstacle to achieving stronger evidence is the variety in training the teachers have 
received before they start facilitating philosophical enquiries: “The amount of training and experience 
of the teacher who applied P4C could influence its effectiveness. Unfortunately, most of the papers 
did not include this information or, when it was included, they were always considered experts. Thus, 
this variable was not analysed as a moderator” (García-Moriyón, Rebollo and Colom, 2005, p. 16). So, 
we do not know how much of the measured effects can be attributed to training and experience, in 
comparison to the effect caused by the programme itself. We do know that when teachers have 
improved their own inquiry skills, they feel more competent and confident in facilitating the 
development of the inquiry skills of their students (see Nichols, Burgh and Fynes-Clinton (2017). Fair, 
Haas, Gardosik, Johnson, Price and Leipnik, (2015, p. 34) share the following observation: 
 



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Additionally, the teachers who included the sessions weekly were excited to see the 
students so engaged and eager to share their thoughts and listen to opinions of others. The 
teachers who did not include the sessions in their weekly routine shared that they did not 
feel comfortable with the open discussions and felt a lack of control in the classroom. 
 

Similar outcomes have been recently found by Sindberg Jensen (2020). In 2004, Tricky and Topping 
discussed this phenomenon under the heading of implementation integrity: the degree to which an 
intervention is implemented as designed. After an analysis of ten different effect-studies one of their 
conclusions is that “implementation integrity may be highly variable” (p. 374). The lesson to be 
learned here is that effect-studies should provide specific information about the training (and 
mentoring) the teachers receive, not only about what kind of training and how much of it, but—more 
importantly—whether and how it has changed their teaching practice. 
 
Process and Outcome 

 

Reznitskaya (2005) takes us one step further. If we want to claim that a certain effect is the result 
of a specific process, it is not enough to offer a general description of this process. Part of the research 
should be the systematic examination of the classroom dialogues. Otherwise, 
 

the relationship between the dialogic properties of interactions and the individual gains in 
reasoning is being assumed, rather than established”. <…> Also, outcome-type studies are 
typically designed to form an overall opinion regarding the success of a program, rather 
than to understand the underlying mechanisms of cognition. Such studies provide little 
information about the particular components of P4C practice and their relative 
contributions to the acquisition of intended skills. Thus, outcome-type research is 
ineffective for advancing our understanding of socio-cultural influences on learning and for 
providing P4C practitioners with specific, empirically-tested instructional strategies. (p. 10) 
 

She advocates the use of the “Argument Schema Theory” [AST]: 
 

Using AST as a theoretical framework, a P4C discussion can be assessed in terms of 
exhibiting various elements of an argument schema, including, reasons, counter-arguments, 
and rebuttals. This approach will help to make examinations of P4C discussions more 
systematic, methodologically sound, and grounded in an articulated theoretical orientation. 
(Reznitskaya, 2005, p. 8) 

 
The Programme and the Test 

 

Effect-studies rely on the use of one or more tests or assessments. Different studies choose 
different tests. Again, there is a variety within the international community of Philosophy for 
Children. Is that a problem? Not really, until Yan, Walters, Wang and Wang (2018, p. 27) observe: 
“Specifically, those studies conducted in non-Western countries have higher effect sizes than the 
Western ones.” The authors present several possible accounts of this phenomenon, but leave it open 
to the informed reader to select the most likely one. The most plausible account, to my 
understanding, is the relation between the programme and the test. In the three main non-western 
studies (Lam, 2012; Marashi, 2008; Othman and Hashim, 2006) ‘the programme’ is the IAPC 



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programme and ‘the test’ is the New Jersey Test of Reasoning Skills (see Shipman 1983), a test which 
was specifically designed to test the reasoning skills as taught in the IAPC-programme. In all other 
studies tests have been used which bear no close relation to ‘the programme’. In their meta-analysis, 
García-Moriyón, Rebollo and Colom (2005) address this close relation: “The New Jersey Test of 
Reasoning Skills was designed as one P4C proxy measure. Unsurprisingly, greater effect sizes were 
observed for that test. Such practices [an intimate connection between what is taught and what is 
tested, PM] must be avoided as far as possible.” (p. 21). On the other hand, in the same study the 
authors conclude that “a serious obstacle to comparing the accumulated evidence of the past 30 years 
(…) arises from the difficulties involved in reaching an accepted definition of reasoning skills” (p. 15). 
 

Given this situation, a number of effect-studies have turned to tests which are not specifically 
tailored to measure philosophical thinking but are widely accepted and respected. The meta-analysis 
by Yan, Walters, Wang and Wang (2018) shows that CAT / CogAT [Cognitive Abilities Test] is the 
most commonly used test. One of the reasons for using such a test is that, if a Philosophy for 
Children programme makes a difference in the test score, and this is usually achieved within a limited 
period of time—in most studies the intervention is less than a year—one knows for sure that such a 
programme is powerful: it has the potential to raise the level of performance in cognitive abilities. 
Strategically, demonstrating such an effect may be necessary for Philosophy for Children in order to 
be taken seriously, as a valuable addition to the curriculum and as new perspective on teaching. Above 
that, using such a test will help to identify in which areas the performance has improved, for example: 
“All of the gain in the CAT scores comes from the verbal subscale. There was very little difference 
between treatment and control groups in terms of quantitative, non-verbal, and spatial elements of the 
CAT” (Gorard 2015, p. 4). 
 

But we can’t deny that there is a tension between what’s asked and rewarded in such tests and 
the aims of Philosophy for Children. For example, in such a test one of the questions may be:  
 

“All questions have an answer. 
Given this, which of the following statements is not possible? 
(a) …, (b) …, (c)…, 
(d) The professor discussed a number of questions which don’t have an answer”. 
 

The only answer for which the test awards points is (d), but philosophically speaking, the word that 
turns this question into a philosophical one is the word ‘possible’: what does it mean when one says 
that statement (d) is ‘not possible’? And is ‘having an answer’ not an ambiguous statement? Do 
questions ‘have’ an answer? The question from the test could serve as a stimulus for a rich 
philosophical enquiry, but the students’ ability to analyse the different arguments for and against the 
‘possibility’ of what the professor is doing is not an object of the test and is therefore not rewarded. 
 
“Not Under any Thinking Skills Intervention” 

 

So far, effect-studies have been understood to be studies which assess the effect of a specific 
intervention in comparison to a classroom situation without this intervention. This is understandable, 
as the common context is that of a school in which a Philosophy for Children programme is newly 
introduced. The effect of this programme is assessed by comparing students who took part in the 



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programme with students who did not. Briefly stated: the effect = ‘treatment A versus no treatment.’ 
There is, however, another type of effect-studies. In these studies, two approaches are compared, in 
order to find out about differences in effects and effectivity. This is the common format of research 
in, for example, medical treatments: is protocol or medicine A more effective than protocol or 
medicine B? In the realm of Philosophy for Children there are only a few of these effect-studies. A 
recent example is Worley and Worley (2019) on teaching critical thinking and metacognitive skills. 
An earlier example is Othman and Hashim (2006). Interestingly, Yan, Walters, Wang and Wang 
(2018) have excluded this study from their meta-analysis with the following reason: “The study 
conducted by Othman and Hashim (2006) was excluded because the experiment’s control group was 
still participating in another thinking skills intervention. This study compared P4C to another 
thinking programme (the Reader Response Program). Thus, the control group is not neutral. The 
control groups in all the included studies were not under any thinking skills intervention” (p. 20). In a 
strict sense this may have been the case: the students in the control group were not involved in 
another programme of which one of its aims is to improve thinking skills. But in a wider sense, isn’t 
education by definition a “thinking skills intervention”? Reading, writing, listening, memorising, 
repeating, answering—for a student it is hard to practise them without applying thinking skills. Schools 
organise all kinds of learning activities which involve thinking skills, like improving reading skills, 
developing learning strategies, and practicing memory training techniques. All in all, it is hard to 
imagine a control group being ‘neutral.’ 
 

The lesson we learn here is that for an effect-study it would not be enough to provide a detailed 
description of 'the intervention’. It should also contain a similar description of ‘the programme’ of the 
control group. 
 

Reflecting on the use of the word ‘intervention’, we can learn another lesson, namely that an 
effect-study should make its arguments explicit for the duration of the programme / intervention as 
object of the study. It may be that the effects of a longer delivery of the programme are different from 
the effects of a shorter version. Studying long-term practices of having philosophical enquiries may 
also reveal specific conditions which are favourable or even necessary for a solid implementation and 
establishment of a Philosophy for Children programme. See for example Lord, Dirie, Kettlewell and 
Styles (2021), who report: 
 

The trial started in October 2016 with programme delivery from September 2017 to July 
2019. <…> Of the 75 intervention schools, after two years from commencement, a 
substantial minority (35 of 75 schools) were not implementing P4C at the expected level. 
Of these, six did not implement P4C at all due to other priorities and/or senior leader 
turnover. The evaluation suggests that it takes time for teachers to become confident with, 
use and embed the P4C approach and this could have impacted the outcomes. (p. 6) 
 

Understandings of Philosophy 

 
“An Accepted Definition of Reasoning Skills” 

 

In 2005 García-Moriyón, Rebollo and Colom envisaged that the international community 
would be “reaching an accepted definition of reasoning skills” (p. 15). We have not reached that point 



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yet, and it may remain a wish for quite a few more years. Why? Basically, because there is (and will 
remain) criticism from two opposing sides: any list of reasoning skills will be both too narrow and too 
wide at the same time. 
 

It will be too narrow because such a list will focus on individual reasoning activities. Hence the 
popularity of “21st century skills”, with much emphasis on communication and collaboration. But, as 
these critics say, as long as we restrict ourselves to ‘reasoning’ and ‘skills’, our scope will be too narrow. 
Isn’t philosophy about wondering, exploring, reflecting, and finding out? David Velleman reflects on 
his life as an academic philosopher and addresses his colleagues in the introduction to his new book, 
“On being me”: 
 

Academic philosophers who read this book will say, ‘But there are no arguments!’. Let me 
be the first to say it: There are no arguments. There are only observations […]. For many 
years I thought the arguments were meant to convince the readers, but I found myself 
oddly unconcerned when few if any readers were convinced. I finally realized that I have all 
along been reporting on personal explorations. (Velleman, 2020, p. xii–xiii) 

 

On the other side the criticism stands that a list of reasoning skills (and a fortiori critical thinking 
skills and 21st century skills) will be too wide because the listed skills are only for a part specifically 
philosophical. Many are general, in the sense that they are practised in all kinds of other learning 
activities, from historical reasoning to coding for computers, from mathematical reasoning to chess. 
Participating in philosophical enquiries may contribute to the development of these ‘general’ skills, 
but many other learning activities come with similar claims. 
 
Understandings of Philosophy and Its Impact 

 

In a thorough literature review of articles about the teaching and learning of philosophy in 
primary and secondary schools, Bowyer, Amos and Stevens describe how they were able to identify ten 
different understandings of what philosophy is: (1) a foundational concept, (2) thinking—a skill, a 
disposition, a practice, (3) a method or process, (4) a tool or instrument, (5) a creative task, (6) inquiry, 
(7) search for truth, (8) non-dogmatic teaching and hence the emancipation of thought, (9) communal 
activity, (10) a way of life (Bowyer, Amos and Stevens, 2020, p. 41). The authors demonstrate how 
these views are embedded in specific educational practices. In a second literature review the authors 
apply the same method to all the answers of the question “What does philosophy do?”. They focus on 
the claims in the literature about the impact of philosophy in the classroom and show how these 
claims can be categorised in two distinct types: 
 

The first claim is that philosophy improves academic and cognitive abilities, where the idea 
of ‘cognition’ is captured by forms of reasoning that can be tested and measured. The 
evidence for improvement in academic and cognitive abilities takes the form of IQ scores, 
Cognitive Abilities Test (CAT) and school academic assessments, including norm-
referenced tests of reading, reasoning, and other curriculum-related assessments. The 
second claim is that engaging with the world philosophically promotes the art of living well 
together. It is argued that philosophical engagement is a collaborative endeavour, aimed at 
cultivating understanding through respectful interactions that are open to exploring, 
questioning and challenging aspects of the world. (Bowyer, Amos and Stevens, 2021, p. 71) 



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The authors mention a number of tests which can be used to substantiate claims of the first type. 
Some of them have been discussed here. Regarding the claims of the second type, the authors’ view is 
that “the evidence for this work of philosophy is based on testimony from teachers, principals, parents 
and students themselves.” (Bowyer, Amos and Stevens, 2021, p. 74) 
 

Few attempts have been made to create a theoretical model for ‘philosophical engagement’ per 
se. One of them is the PhD thesis by Rondhuis (2005), which is devoted to the design and empirical 
validation of a general model of what she calls “philosophical talent”. This study is one of the very few 
studies which combine a thorough analysis of the philosophical activity, the development of a 
conceptual model and an extensive effect-study of philosophical discourses among children and 
adolescents. In her research project Philosophical Talent, the key-question “Which features signify 
philosophical quality?” is answered as follows: 
 

six indicators for philosophical quality were distinguished, correlating with six thinking 
patterns or attitudes representing specific philosophical qualities or aspects of them. Each 
indicator covers a group of linguistic expressions. These indicators are: 
1. Indecisive thinking, 2. Openness, 3. Tentative behaviour, 4. Epistemic position, 5. 
Reasoning quality, and 6. Anecdotal quality. (Rondhuis, 2005, p. 58) 
 

For a concise presentation of her research, see Rondhuis (2006), also Rondhuis and Van der Leeuw 
(2000). 
 

Effect-studies in the Near Future 

 

In his presentation on “Philosophy and the cultivation of reasoning”, Lipman clearly stated:  
 

There are many ways in which philosophy can be taught to school children from 
kindergarten through high school. It does not have to be done the way we at the Institute 
for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children have done it, but we can only report our 
own experience.” (Lipman, 1985, p. 37) 

  
The international community of Philosophy for Children demonstrates how philosophical dialogues 
can be done in different ways, with a wide variety of aims and topics. There is no reason to assume 
that this diversity will lessen in the future. We will have to live with it, but it presents a number of 
specific challenges to future effect-studies, as we have seen. The following recommendations are 
offered for further consideration. They should be read in addition to, not in competition with other 
recent proposals for future research, like Reed-Sandoval and Sykes (2017, p. 223– 224). 
 
(1) Effect-studies should contain a detailed description of both the intervention and of the programme 
of the control group. This should include detailed information about the ‘dosage’ of activities: in 
which kinds of activities were the students (and teacher) involved and to which intensity. Under the 
umbrella of ICPIC, a special interest group on research should be created in order to draft a format 
for such a description. Researchers complete it for their specific studies and add it to their reports. 
 



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(2) Effect-studies should be specific about the training (and mentoring) the teachers receive, not only 
what kind of training and how much of it, but—more importantly—whether and how it has changed 
their teaching practice. 
 
(3) An international initiative should be launched for the development of a common framework for 
the description of philosophical activities within Philosophy for Children. Confidence that this can be 
done may be derived from other, much larger but nevertheless successful, international efforts to 
develop a common framework, like the CEFR standard, the Common European Framework of 
Reference for Languages, and for levels of education the NQF, the National Qualifications 
Framework. 
 
(4) More effect-studies should be done outside the context of schools. Part of the diversity within the 
Philosophy for Children is that it is no longer exclusively done within the setting of a school but is 
seen as a community-based activity; see Lockrobin (2019). 
 
(5) More effect-studies should focus on non-cognitive effects, as they are particularly relevant within 
the understandings of philosophy as a creative task, as communal activity, and as a way of life (as 
described by Bowyer, Amos and Stevens, 2020). 
 
(6) There should be a better balance between effect-studies focusing on effects in terms of general 
cognitive skills and studies which focus on progress in philosophical thinking specifically. 
 
(7) It’s time to move towards studies which assess the effects of long-term practices of having 
philosophical enquiries. The arguments for the relevance of a Philosophy for Children programme 
have always positioned such a programme as a permanent part of the curriculum. Effect-studies which 
show the effects of short-term interventions do not provide much support to these arguments. It is 
time to correct this imbalance. 
 

Acknowledgements 

 
I want to thank Pablo Lamberti, Griet Galle and the journal’s reviewer for their valuable suggestions. 
In my role as a ‘veteran’ I cannot write about Philosophy for Children without paying tribute to my 
late colleague Karel van der Leeuw. With him I attended the IAPC summer school in 1983. There the 
first outline of our joint PhD thesis took shape, devoted to the teaching of ‘doing philosophy’. In 
1988 we presented it in its final form, the product of years of intense dialogues. A year later, we 
founded the Dutch centre for Philosophy for Children. In 2015 Karel died; I write this article in 
commemoration of his contribution to Philosophy for Children. 
 
 

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Address Correspondences to:  
Pieter Mostert,  
Dorchester, England. 
The Philosophy Foundation, London. 
Email: pmostert@xs4all.nl 

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