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 modi®ability, 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 in¯uence 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.

Distanciation et mémorisation des noms à 5 ans : une recherche action en ZEP

“…Dans son récent plaidoyer sur l'éducation cognitive et sa nécessaire remise en cause des objectifs péda-gogiques de l'école que nous évoquerons brièvement plus loin, H. C. Haywood (2004) (1996 & 2000) sur une population d'enfants d'immigrants des quartiers défavorisés de Marseille, dont le taux de chô-mage concernait plus de 50 % des pères de famille et dont la langue parlée à la maison était le plus souvent l'arabe. Le programme est mis en place en grande section de Maternelle et ses effets mesurés jusqu'aux évaluations nationales de CE2.…”

The Relationships among Verbal Skills of Primary School Students with Specific Learning Disabilities and a Typically Developing Comparison Group

“…Traditionally, it has been accepted that children with LD do not achieve commensurate with their age, ability, and educational experience, and these children demonstrate severe discrepancies between achievement and intellectual ability (Siegel, 2003). In the past decade, the focus on a single global measure of intelligence to identify learning disabilities has been criticised, and the importance of using cognitive and neuropsychological tasks to assess deficiencies in specific skills associated with school learning and achievement has been emphasised (Haywood, 2004;Siegel, 1999). Luria's (1969) theory of brain organisation that postulated three basic units of the brain, each with particular functions guiding simple and complex behaviours during learning, has been used as a conceptual foundation for some test batteries (e.g., Kaufman & Kaufman, 2004), and for guidance in evaluation and treatment (e.g., Culbertson & Edmonds, 2004).…”

“…Intelligence tests mainly include simple digit-span subtests to assess memory (e.g., Kaufman & Kaufman, 1983, 2004Wechsler, 2005). In free recall tasks with semantically related words, children's ability to classify the information to be remembered facilitates memorisation and improves performance.…”

Educational Reform: A Case Study of Teachers’ Attitudes, Perceptions, and Engagement Throughout Curricular Reform

“…Reform -The term reform holds a range of definitions as designated by a host of professionals within the field of education (Feldmann, 2005;Haywood, 2004). The term may refer to efforts made toward specific improvements within a singular aspect of the education system (Asghari, Shahvarani, & Medghalchi, 2011;Branyon, 2012).…”

“…Take for example H. Carl Haywood's (2004) call for educational reform. Haywood begins his argument for reform with the statement that while "almost everybody agrees that educational reform is needed, … there is not universal agreement on the nature of the problems, and certainly not on the remedies" (p. 231).…”