Teachers need to monitor students' developing facility not only with inductive reasoning but also with deductive reasoning. In the middle grades, students begin to consider assertions such as the following: The diagonals of any given rectangle are equal in length. (See the "Geometry" section of this chapter for more discussion of how this assertion might be generated and verified by students.) An assertion such as this is tricky, at least in part because it is an implicitly conditional statement: If a shape is a rectangle, then its diagonals are equal in length. Thus, it is probably not surprising that some students will misapply this idea by inferring that any quadrilateral with diagonals of equal length must be a rectangle. Doing so reflects the erroneous view that if a statement is true then its converse is true. In this instance, the converse is not true because nonrectangular isosceles trapezoids also have diagonals of equal length, as do many other quadrilaterals.