# ICT Skills in the Deployment of 21 st Century Skills:
## 4 Possible Developmental Antecedents for ICT 21 st Century Skills in Early Childhood
### Inductive Reasoning  
Inductive reasoning is concerned with inferring theories and categories from singular cases and rules. There have been many studies on young children's ability for inductive reasoning, and their main results are that children are able to make inductive inferences if they can rely on typicality, similarities, and underlying causal reasons for induction. For example, [PERSON] and [PERSON] [36] found that 2-year-old children rely on typicality for induction. In their study, children were more likely to determine that a typical bird (e.g., a chickadee) lived in a nest just like the example bird, a robin, than an atypical bird (e.g., an ostrich). Concerning similarities, [PERSON] and [PERSON] [37] discovered that children younger than 8 years draw inferences from similar samples instead of diverse ones. In their study, children were confronted with evidence from samples of mammals that were either homogenous or diverse. Then, children were provided with more evidence on samples of mammals, vertebrates, and invertebrates. The children drew more inductive inferences the homogenous samples than from diverse ones, indicating that young children fail to see the value of diversity for induction. Underlying causal relations support inductive reasoning as well. In one study, [PERSON] and [PERSON] [38] found that children were more likely to make inductive inferences about fantasy animals with causally related features than fantasy animals with causally unrelated features. Similarly, in a study by [PERSON] and [PERSON] [39], children were more likely to use causal relations than perceptual similarity for inductive inferences. However, in the absence of causal information, children relied heavily on perceptual similarity for induction. [PERSON] and her colleagues [40], as well as [PERSON] and [PERSON] [41], came to similar results on children's reliance on perceptual similarities in the absence of causal information. \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c} \hline \hline
**Possible Developmental Antecedents** & **21 st Century Skills [4]** & **ICT Skills in Young Children** \\ \hline \multirow{4}{*}{Abductive reasoning} & Technical skills & \multirow{2}{*}{Infer rules and regularities about devices and digital games, explain inconsistencies, formulate ideas to solve problems} \\  & Information skills & & \\  & Critical thinking skills & & \\  & Problem-solving skills & & \\  & Critical thinking skills & & \\  & Problem-solving skills & & \\  & Critical thinking skills & & \\  & Problem-solving skills & & \\  & Critical thinking skills & & \\  & Information skills & & \\  & Collaboration skill & & \\  & Problem-solving skills & & \\  & Problem-solving skills & & \\  & Problem-solving skills & & \\  & Problem-solving skills & & \\  & Problem-solving skills & & \\  & & & \\  & Technical skills & & \\  & Creative skills & & \\  & Information skills & & \\  & Communication skills & & \\  & & & \\  & Collaboration skills & & \\  & Communication skills & & \\  & Collaboration skills & & \\  & Collaboration skills & & \\  & Communication skills & & \\  & Collaboration skills & & \\  & Collaboration skills & & \\  & & & \\  
Inductive reasoning can inform 21 st century technical, information, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills (Table 1). First, induction can help children uncover commonalities between different digital devices and support their _technical skills_. Second, for _information skills_, children can use typicality, similarity, and causal relations to categorize new information into existing categories or develop new ones [42]. Taking children's development into consideration, provided information, e.g., when learning about different animals in digital settings, should either be typical (e.g., a robin instead of an ostrich), similar (e.g., a robin and a chickadee) or have underlying causal relations that the children can infer (see causal reasoning) or are communicated to them (e.g., nocturnal animals tend to have large eyes so they can see in the dark).