Our current education paradigm, which tasks teachers with the responsibility in the learning and teaching equation, reflects neither what we know about how learning takes place nor how student achievement levels can be significantly improved.
We cannot continue to thrive economically as a nation with only about a third of our students performing proficiently at grade level. We worry about our children and grandchildren. The solutions that are offered are essentially to provide more teaching, which may be in the form of high intensity tutoring or data informed instruction. But it is simply placing more on the teacher. We can’t keep putting the whole burden for raising student performance on their backs.
There is an answer
When students strengthen their cognitive skills, they don’t just perform better academically, they feel better about learning. After completing Comprehensive Integrated Cognitive Training (CICT), students share comments like these.
“I finally care about my schoolwork. I definitely have more patience and focus better on tasks.” 8th Grade Student
“I’m finally at grade-level reading!” 5th Grade Student
“I feel more confident about doing my work.” 5th Grade Student
“I have gotten a little braver about making mistakes.” 4th Grade Student
These aren’t isolated stories. In a recent analysis of feedback from 106 students:
- 95% of students reported some or a lot of improvement in attention and focus
- 93% reported some or a lot of improvement in their confidence in their learning ability
- 86% reported some or a lot of improvement in their ability to stay organized and get their work done
- 77% reported some or a lot of improvement in their attitude towards learning and school
Remove Barriers. Unlock Potential
CICT targets the cognitive skills that drive academic success—attention, working memory, processing speed, and more. In just 12-14 weeks, students experience measurable improvements in both cognitive functioning and classroom outcomes.
And it’s not extra work for teachers—it’s a solution that makes teaching easier by addressing the root causes of learning struggles.
Cognitive Learning Theory makes the case that we can use what we know about the cognitive processes needed for learning and research on effective learning strategies to make learning more productive and efficient. In this context, what learners and teachers need to understand then, are the cognitive skills involved in learning, both generally and for that individual learner, and the types of learning experiences that are most effective in getting information through those cognitive processes, stored in long-term memory and available for use in practice.
Cognitive Skills and Learning
Cognitive skills are the mental processes our brains use to take in, understand, organize, store, retrieve and use information.
They include a variety of
- attention skills
- visual processing
- auditory processing
- sensory integration
- memory, executive functions and reasoning
Cognitive skills are the foundation of learning and account for an estimated 50% of the variance in academic performance.
For a basic understanding of cognitive skills, we recommend
The next thing we need to understand about cognitive skills is that every individual has cognitive strengths and weaknesses, and it is this that accounts, to an under-appreciated degree, for the dramatic variability of students’ ability to learn different types of information. Thus, cognitive learning requires that teachers understand their students’ cognitive profiles and that each student understands their own cognitive strengths and weaknesses and develops the ability to practice the learning strategies that are best suited to their individual learning capacity.
Boosting Cognitive Skills
In addition to adopting best-fit strategies according to a student’s learning profile, teachers and students also need to understand that cognitive skills can be developed. Whatever cognitive strengths and weaknesses we have, we can improve our capacity to learn by strengthening our cognitive skills.
Designing the Learning Experience
Since each brain must process new information for itself, the role of the instructor (whether a teacher, a trainer, or an individual learning on their own), is to facilitate a learning experience that will result in efficient and effective learning for a variety of different individual brains. This is why cognitive learning focuses on the interaction of the student with the information/experience.
Interacting with material in meaningful ways and in a variety of ways will help connect it to existing neural networks (or schemata) in stronger and more durable ways.
Our brains did not evolve to learn meaningless information, so learning experiences need to emphasize enabling students to build meaning. This can be accomplished with activities that involve elaboration, rather than rote memorization (recall that cognitive learning focuses on declarative knowledge, not procedural knowledge where rote practice is, in fact, applicable).
Elaborative learning strategies could include activities such as:
- Reciprocal or peer teaching
- Metaphor and analogy
- Mnemonics
- Models
- Story-telling
- Role-playing
- Problem-based learning (or project-based learning)
- Developing visuals and graphics
- Simulations
- Hands-on activities
- Rhythm, rhyme and rap
- Mind maps (semantic maps)
- Reflect and write (journaling)
Metacognition
While the term metacognition doesn’t always appear in discussions of cognitive learning, it does capture the essence of the approach. Cognitive learning requires metacognition or thinking about one’s thinking and one’s progress in the learning process. It requires understanding one’s cognitive skills and how to best use them in learning experiences and it requires an understanding of the learning process itself to make it deeper and more meaningful.
One definition of metacognition that captures this sense is provided by the TEAL Center (the Teaching Excellence in Adult Literacy Center, a project of the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Career, Technical, and Adult Education (OCTAE):
“Metacognition is one’s ability to use prior knowledge to plan a strategy for approaching a learning task, take necessary steps to problem solve, reflect on and evaluate results, and modify one’s approach as needed. It helps learners choose the right cognitive tool for the task and plays a critical role in successful learning.”
This implies, like the discussion of cognitive learning above, the need to take into account individual learner variabilities, the characteristics of the learning task and the strategies one employs to facilitate the learner’s experience.
About the authors
