Research related to LSAT preparation increasing one's reasoning skills

Two small studies from the same research group at the University of California, Berkeley suggest that intensive LSAT preparation can improve logical reasoning skills, with some limited transfer to an unpracticed reasoning task. The 2013 study found no significant improvement in LSAT Reading Comprehension scores, and the 2015 study found no evidence of broader cognitive gains beyond one relational-reasoning task. Both studies were small and did not randomly assign participants, so their findings should be treated as preliminary.

First study: Three months of LSAT preparation

Study: Intensive Reasoning Training Alters Patterns of Brain Connectivity at Rest, The Journal of Neuroscience, March 13, 2013. 33(11): 4796–4803

In a 2013 study in The Journal of Neuroscience, researchers followed 25 young adults taking an LSAT course with about 70 hours of reasoning instruction and compared them with 24 age- and IQ-matched controls who planned to take the LSAT later.

• The students' practice-test scores rose significantly over the course, although the control group did not take practice tests, so these gains could not be compared with theirs.
• Scores rose on the Logical Reasoning section and on the Analytical Reasoning ("Logic Games") section, which LSAC removed from the test in August 2024.
• Reading Comprehension scores did not change significantly.
• Brain scans indicated strengthened functional connectivity between frontal and parietal regions associated with reasoning, compared with the control group. Such changes are interesting, but they do not by themselves show improved reasoning ability.

Second study: Improvement on an unfamiliar reasoning task

Study: Characterizing Behavioral and Brain Changes Associated with Practicing Reasoning Skills, PLoS One. 2015 Sep 14; 10(9): e0137627. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0137627

A 2015 study in PLOS ONE by the same research group tested whether the reasoning gains carried over to tasks the students had not practiced.

• Students in an LSAT course improved more than controls on a non-verbal task that required integrating relationships between pieces of information (judging relative weights from balance scales), a task unlike the text-based questions they had practiced.
• They showed no comparable gains on a second unpracticed task that required generating rules, or on tests of working memory and processing speed.
• The authors described their results as preliminary because participants were not randomly assigned and the control group did not take a comparable course.

Summary

The research provides evidence that LSAT preparation improves performance on LSAT practice tests and offers preliminary evidence of transfer to at least one reasoning task outside the test. It does not establish that LSAT preparation improves general intellectual ability.