Cognitive training has been theorized to affect the educational development of children for quite awhile. Paul Eggen and Don Kauchak write in Educational Psychology: Windows on Classrooms, Sixth Edition:
- Cognitive Perspectives on Learning
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Although elements of cognitive learning theory have a long history, what is commonly termed the “cognitive revolution” occurred at about the middle of the 20th century. Cognitive views of learning evolved, in part, because behaviorism was unable to explain complex phenomena such as language learning and problem solving as well as a number of everyday events, such as why people respond differently to the same stimulus.
Cognitive learning theory assumes that learners are active in their attempts to understand the world, new understanding depends on prior learning, learners construct understanding, and learning is a change in people’s mental structures instead of changes in observable behavior. http://wps.prenhall.com/chet_eggen_education_6/0,8057,885470-,00.html
Cognitive learning techniques can be used by parents of at-risk children to help their children advance academically.
Sarah D. Sparks wrote in the 2011 Education Week article, Neuroscience Ed. Winner Finds Cognitive Training Helps Parents, Students:
Helen J. Neville, the director of the Brain Development Lab and the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Oregon in Eugene, believes training parents as well as children in cognitive techniques can help to close early achievement gaps.
Neville has been named the winner of the 2011Transforming Education Through Neuroscience award, sponsored by the International Mind Brain Education Society and the Learning and the Brain Foundation, for her studies of parent and child cognitive training to improve attention.
Neville worked with more than 100 at-risk children in Head Start centers and their parents. The children, ages 3 to 5, received 40 minutes of training in attention for four days a week for eight weeks. A typical session might include watching snails travel from one point to another, or observing other children playing with balloons—activities requiring patience, focus, and mental self-control.
For one group of children, Neville and her colleagues provided weekly, two-hour training sessions for their parents on activities associated with improving cognitive focus in young children, such as using specific praise and positive enforcement; engaging the children in turn-taking conversations; and providing opportunities for the children to choose and solve problems.
The researchers found that training parents as well as children amplified the effects of the intervention. Neville found that for the group in which both parents and children received training, the children improved significantly in their attention, nonverbal IQ scores, associative memory and receptive language skills. Moreover, their parents reported significantly lower stress levels and improved child behavior. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/inside-school-research/2011/12/neuroscience_education_award_w.html?intc=es
Parents who can afford cognitive learning tutoring are providing cognitive learning training for their children.
Dan Hurley wrote the New York Times article, the Brain Trainers:
On this Wednesday evening at the Upper Montclair, N.J., outlet of LearningRx, a chain of 83 “brain training” franchises across the United States, the goal is to improve cognitive skills. LearningRx is one of a growing number of such commercial services — some online, others offered by psychologists. Unlike traditional tutoring services that seek to help students master a subject, brain training purports to enhance comprehension and the ability to analyze and mentally manipulate concepts, images, sounds and instructions. In a word, it seeks to make students smarter.
“We measure every student pre- and post-training with a version of the Woodcock-Johnson general intelligence test,” said Ken Gibson, who began franchising LearningRx centers in 2003, and has data on more than 30,000 of the nearly 50,000 students who have been trained. “The average gain on I.Q. is 15 points after 24 weeks of training, and 20 points in less than 32 weeks.”
The three other large cognitive training services — Lumosity, Cogmed and Posit Science — dance around the question of whether they truly raise I.Q. but do assert that they improve cognitive performance.
“Your brain, just brighter,” is the slogan of Lumosity, an online company that now has some 25 million registered members. According to its Web site, “Our users have reported profound benefits that include: clearer and quicker thinking; faster problem-solving skills; increased alertness and awareness; better concentration at work or while driving; sharper memory for names, numbers and directions.”
Those results are achieved, the companies say, by repurposing cognitive tasks initially developed by psychologists as tests of mental abilities. With technical names like the antisaccade, the N-back and the complex working memory span task, the exercises are dressed up as games that become increasingly difficult as students gain mastery….
One skeptic is Douglas K. Detterman, professor of psychology at Case Western Reserve University and founding editor of the influential academic journal Intelligence. His research would seem to offer reassurance to college-bound brain trainees, because he has found a close correlation between I.Q. and SAT scores. “All of these tests are pretty much the same thing,” he said. “They measure general intelligence.”
The catch, however, is that Dr. Detterman believes that cognitive training only makes people better at taking tests, without improving their underlying intelligence. Dr. Detterman said of brain training, “It’s probably not harmful. But I would tell parents: Save your money. Look at the studies the commercial services have done to support their results. You’ll find very poorly done studies, with no control groups and all kinds of problems.”
Executives at traditional tutoring and test-prep services tend to share Dr. Detterman’s view — perhaps not surprisingly, because some of the brain training programs pitch themselves in direct contrast to standard tutoring. (“Brain Training vs. Tutoring,” says the headline of a LearningRx brochure. “Is tutoring what your child really needs?”) Bror Saxberg, chief learning officer of Kaplan Inc., questions whether improving performance on an intelligence test will translate directly to improved grades and test scores…
Still,a new and growing body of scientific evidence indicates that cognitive training can be effective, including that offered by commercial services.
Oliver W. Hill Jr., a professor of psychology at Virginia State University in Petersburg, recently completed a $1 million study, yet to be published, financed by the National Science Foundation to test the effects of LearningRx. He looked at 340 middle-school students who spent two hours a week for a semester using LearningRx exercises in their schools’ computer labs and an equal number of students who received no such training. Those who played the online games, Dr. Hill found, not only improved significantly on measures of cognitive abilities compared to their peers, but also on Virginia’s annual Standards of Learning exam.
He’s now conducting a follow-up study of college students in Texas and, he said, sees even stronger gains when the training is offered one on one.
Michael Merzenich, who spent years conducting brain plasticity research in animals as a professor at the University of California, San Francisco, started Posit Science to make the results of his research more widely available. “This is medicine,” he insisted. “It is driving changes in the brain.” http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/04/education/edlife/a-new-kind-of-tutoring-aims-to-make-students-smarter.html?ref=education
Many school districts are trying integrate cognitive techniques into their instruction. Lacking resources to provide more individual tutoring, these districts often rely on technology.
Trip Gabriel and Matt Richtel write in the 2011 New York Times article, Inflating the Software Report Card:
Amid a classroom-based software boom estimated at $2.2 billion a year, debate continues to rage over the effectiveness of technology on learning and how best to measure it. But it is hard to tell that from technology companies’ promotional materials.
Many companies ignore well-regarded independent studies that test their products’ effectiveness. Carnegie’s Web site, for example, makes no mention of the 2010 review, by the Education Department’s What Works Clearinghouse, which analyzed 24 studies of Cognitive Tutor’s effectiveness but found that only four of those met high research standards. Some firms misrepresent research by cherry-picking results and promote surveys or limited case studies that lack the scientific rigor required by the clearinghouse and other authorities.
“The advertising from the companies is tremendous oversell compared to what they can actually demonstrate,” said Grover J. Whitehurst, a former director of the Institute of Education Sciences, the federal agency that includes What Works.
School officials, confronted with a morass of complicated and sometimes conflicting research, often buy products based on personal impressions, marketing hype or faith in technology for its own sake.
“They want the shiny new one,” said Peter Cohen, chief executive of Pearson School, a leading publisher of classroom texts and software. “They always want the latest, when other things have been proven the longest and demonstrated to get results….”
In a recent interview, Dr. Allen said she was familiar with the What Works Clearinghouse, but not its 2010 finding that Cognitive Tutor did not raise test scores more than textbooks.
Though the clearinghouse is intended to help school leaders choose proven curriculum, a 2010 Government Accountability Office survey of district officials found that 58 percent of them had never heard of What Works, never mind consulted its reviews.
“Decisions are made on marketing, on politics, on personal preference,” said Robert A. Slavin, director of the Center for Research and Reform in Education at Johns Hopkins University. “An intelligent, caring principal who’d never buy a car without looking at Consumer Reports, when they plunk down serious money to buy a curriculum, they don’t even look at the evidence.” http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/technology/a-classroom-software-boom-but-mixed-results-despite-the-hype.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
More research about cognitive learning techniques is needed.
Resources:
Short- and long-term benefits of cognitive training
+ Author Affiliations
- Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1043
- Edited by Dale Purves, Duke University Medical Center, Durham, NC, and approved May 17, 2011 (received for review March 1, 2011)
Abstract
Does cognitive training work? There are numerous commercial training interventions claiming to improve general mental capacity; however, the scientific evidence for such claims is sparse. Nevertheless, there is accumulating evidence that certain cognitive interventions are effective. Here we provide evidence for the effectiveness of cognitive (often called “brain”) training. However, we demonstrate that there are important individual differences that determine training and transfer. We trained elementary and middle school children by means of a videogame-like working memory task. We found that only children who considerably improved on the training task showed a performance increase on untrained fluid intelligence tasks. This improvement was larger than the improvement of a control group who trained on a knowledge-based task that did not engage working memory; further, this differential pattern remained intact even after a 3-mo hiatus from training. We conclude that cognitive training can be effective and long-lasting, but that there are limiting factors that must be considered to evaluate the effects of this training, one of which is individual differences in training performance. We propose that future research should not investigate whether cognitive training works, but rather should determine what training regimens and what training conditions result in the best transfer effects, investigate the underlying neural and cognitive mechanisms, and finally, investigate for whom cognitive training is most useful. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/06/03/1103228108
What is Cognitive Training? – YouTube
► 3:52► 3:52 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbg1Ilj5nQoJun 2, 2009 – 4 min – Uploaded by AdvancedLearningConc
Cognitive Training can help you train your brain to plan, organize, remember, focus, make good decisions and …
What is Cognitive Training?
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