Thinking In, Around, and About The Curriculum: the role of cognitive education

Abstract

Although everybody agrees that education reform is needed, there is little agreement on the nature of the problems, and certainly not on the remedies; nevertheless, there is a central focus on curriculum issues. Three principal points are addressed in this paper: (a) new approaches in education are urgently needed, (b) new educational approaches require revised concepts of the nature and development of human abilities, and (c) those new concepts must lead inevitably to emphasis on the acquisition, growth, and application of systematic processes of logical thinking, which is to say, “cognitive” or “metacognitive” education. The author presents a “transactional perspective” on human abilities, with three principal components: intelligence, cognitive processes, and intrinsic motivation. Intelligence and cognitive processes differ with respect to their respective sources, their relative modifiability, their composition, methods of assessment, and the role of parents and teachers in their development. Individual differences in intrinsic motivation are associated with differences in learning effectiveness that are not accounted for by the other two components of the transactional model, which is transactional rather than merely interactive because the ability of any one of the three principal components to influence development of either or both of the other two changes with each effect of one upon another. Two programs of cognitive education, one for preschool children, the other for older children, adolescents, and adults, are described and data are presented showing that systematic classroom application of such programs by well trained teachers can lead to enhancement of cognitive development, intrinsic motivation, and even IQ. Further, relatively long‐term evaluative studies demonstrate that there are positive and long‐lasting effects of cognitive education on subsequent learning and school achievement. Figure 11. School achievement scores, grades 1 and 2, of Bright Start and low‐SES control children (Paour et al., 2000). Figure 10. Percentage of passing grades in French and Math on a national examination, for the national standardisation sample, the high‐SES controls, the low‐SES Bright Start children, and the low‐SES control children. (Paour et al., 2000).