Promoting Cognitive Growth Over the Life Span

Milton Schwebel, Nancy S. Fagley, Charles A. Maher

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781138983946
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134755936
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book introduces special programs designed to enhance thinking and problem solving at the preschool, elementary, secondary, college, and graduate levels, as well as proven instructional methods to aid the elderly in retaining or regaining essential mental skills. The volume also considers difficult problems confronting psychology, including such disparate issues as the appropriate content of courses to develop thinking, resistance to the introduction of programs in schools and universities, and psychology's limitations on progress in these areas.

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION: THE SOCIAL ROLE IN PROMOTING COGNITIVE GROWTH OVER THE LIFE SPAN

Milton Schwebel

Charles A. Maher

Nancy S. Fagley

Rutgers University

Collectively, the authors and editors of this book are interested in the ongoing development of cognition over the life span. Some of us focus our attention on the early years of life, others on young adulthood, and still others on the later years. Apart from those differences, we are united in our concern with the conditions that promote growth in the abilities to achieve, use, and create knowledge at all ages. We are especially interested in conditions that foster thinking, problem solving, and creativity.

Those who confront issues about promoting cognitive growth are faced with two complex problems:

1. What experiences stimulate cognitive growth and effectively involve individuals in their own intellectual development?

2. How can these be incorporated into their lives, through such agents as family, school, university, or senior citizen center?

Looking at past accomplishments in modifying educational institutions for the purpose of promoting cognitive growth, one could become discouraged. When Jean Piaget (1970) examined the methods of teaching in schools in 1965 and compared his observations with those in 1935, he was impressed by the lack of change. A “force feeding” kind of instruction, not calculated to stimulate thought, was characteristic at both points 30 years apart. Very likely, if he were to make observations today, he would find little change in most classrooms. However, at about the time he made his second set of observations, a decisive change in outlook began to emerge. Fueled by social demands and influenced by the newly popular theories of Piaget, Vygotsky, Bruner, and McV. Hunt (and later, of cognitive psychology), psychologists and educational researchers confronted learning and developmental problems with a different perspective from that of the past. Before, children were assessed in order to place them in classes suited to their current ability level, the assumption being that their observed performance was an approximate reflection of their academic potential. Now, assessment was made for the purpose of identifying gaps in the cognitive domain – the structures and skills that were absent or not sufficiently developed, the assumption being that programs could be designed to enable the children to achieve them. As a result, programs to facilitate cognitive development and academic achievement were introduced. These efforts were capped by the federal government’s introduction of Head Start for preschoolers and, later, of Follow Through for children in the primary grades. By those actions the government endorsed a policy of innovation consistent with the new thinking about intervention, accompanied by evaluation, to initiate desired programmatic changes.

Later, but still within the decade of the sixties, social pressures in high schools and on college and university campuses led to an extension of concern to those educational and age levels. Concomitantly, the increasing proportion of older adults in the population, with their problems of memory, and of intellectual functioning in general, spawned a growing interest in and research literature on gerontological issues. For them, too, the ultimate objective was to design experiences to halt, reverse, or at least ameliorate some of the vicissitudes of aging.

Many programs and experimental methods of intervention have been evaluated and the results suggest that were he making an assessment today of potential for change in the schools, Piaget would not be so pessimistic as he was in 1965. He would find settings at all age levels that were not engaged in “force feeding,” although he would recognize them to be all too few in number. He would also find some of the results gratifying; for example, Datta’s (1986) painstaking analysis of the cognitive effects of early childhood programs reveals their positive outcomes, especially the long-term educational and career benefits. There have been comparable advances in knowledge about cognition over the life span, although so far as cognitive functioning is concerned, the years between young and old adulthood remained a largely unexplored area until very recently. In the 1980s psychologists turned from their almost total preoccupation with “academic intelligence,” which is represented by tasks called for both on IQ tests and in school assignments, to “everyday cognition” and “practical intelligence” (Rogoff & Lave, 1984; Sternberg & Wagner, 1986), which involve the demands of coping with life’s situations.

The new thinking about promoting cognitive growth has emerged in many countries besides the United States, including Belgium, Holland, Iceland, Israel, Venezuela, and West Germany. UNESCO commissioned a state of the art report on cognitive development and its facilitation (Schwebel, 1983) and its journal on education, Prospects, features articles on that topic. In sum, the subject of this book – understanding how to help individuals construct the foundations of critical and creative thinking and to encourage its expression thereafter – is very much on the international agenda. And, being on the cutting edge of the behavioral and educational sciences, it is an enterprise filled with challenge, the excitement of new ideas, and the inescapable clash of conflicting views.

The following three sections are intended to set the stage for the remaining chapters. The section on the social role in cognitive growth elaborates concepts that are central to our topic and appear in subsequent chapters. The second section deals with implementation aspects of the social role. The final section, on the chief features of the book, examines several major issues discussed by the authors, including some on which they differ.

THE SOCIAL ROLE IN COGNITIVE GROWTH

In recent years we have come to appreciate that cognitive development involves a partnership between an individual and the social environment. This idea derives from the well-known fact that individuals and their social environments play indispensable parts in cognitive (and other) growth. There are, in other words, both individual and social roles that must be performed in the process of the individual’s development, and these roles operate over the entire life span. A social environment is indispensable, for in its absence individual development, and survival itself, are inconceivable. The quality of that environment is, as we would expect, a sensitive factor. Highly inadequate social environments lead to irreversible cognitive deficiences, as in the well-known case of the animal-nurtured child known as the “feral child” (Itard, 1894/1932) or of the brutally deprived one called “Genie” (Curtis, 1977).

The use of the term social role has a functional purpose. In studies to facilitate development the independent variable is usually referred to as an intervention. And so it is, but it is something more as well. We prefer to think of the independent variable as the social role in a partnership devoted to the individual’s fullest possible realization of intellectual potential. Hence, the difference between intervention and social role is more than rhetorical. Intervention implies that A acts or impacts upon B. After thoughtful consideration as an uninvolved observer A determines B’s needs and seeks to satisfy them by means of the intervention. By implication, at least, A is uninvolved with and unaffected by B. (In fact, we know that in reality many interveners do not maintain such a remote relationship.) In a partnership the relationship between A and B is reciprocal. Each has its own role to perform, both roles are essential, and the two interact with each other.

Such a partnership exists between parent and child. For example, mother’s cooing may have been elicited in the first place by baby’s action or expression and, in any event, will be continued or replaced by other behavior depending on the response she gets from the infant, as well as her own needs. The partnership also exists in the teacher – student relationship where the operating definition of the social role determines whether the chief activity will be the teacher’s force-feeding (to borrow from Piaget) of disinterested if acquiescent students, who could be 6, 16, or 60 years of age, or on the other hand, thought-provoking experience involving students and teacher. One other form of partnership deserves to be mentioned, that between the innovator of a program (e.g., a psychologist) and those who are expected to introduce it (usually teachers). Too often in the latter case, failure to recognize this relationship as a partnership has led to resistance and even rejection of the program and, in any event, unsatisfactory conditions to evaluate its effectiveness.

In each instance in the previous paragraph the individual would traditionally be thought of as being on the receiving end of an intervention: the child (with mother), the student (with teacher), and the teacher (with innovator). That is not so in the case of a partnership, even when the partnership is unequal as it surely is between mother and baby. The participation of the other person, who might appropriately be called “senior partner” at the outset, is recognized as a necessary step to elevating and accelerating the participation of the individuals in their own cognitive growth. It is probably fair to say that no other objective is more significant in promoting all-around intellectual growth than that of individuals actively participating in and regulating their own development. In that sense, the purpose of the social role in the promotion of cognitive growth is to strengthen individuals’ roles in advancing their cognitive capabilities.

We must make a distinction at the outset between social activity that, without design, may have the effect of facilitating development and that which is devised solely for such a purpose. In the former category are such experiences as parent – child communication, child – child play, teenagers’ conversation about adolescent concerns, assertiveness training sessions, and senior citizen discussion groups. Whatever other benefits may accrue from those activities, there is reason to believe that they may contribute in varying degrees to the individual’s achievement and use of knowledge.

Formal education falls in a no-man’s-land so far as categorization is concerned. Unquestionably it is designed, but for what? In practice, schools are intended to provide individuals with the skills and habits appropriate to the occupational and social positions they will hold on leaving school. One of their functions is, in fact, a sorting out process, identifying, classifying, and preparing young people for their future places, including menial and repetitive jobs. In that sense schools play a conservative role, hardly one inclined to cultivate critical thinking and dissenting views.

Despite the cramped nature of its social role, there is evidence that traditional schooling does contribute to intellectual development, over and above the accumulation of information and acquisition of academic skills. Determining whether education has that influence is an enormously difficult task because the researcher must discount the effects of other influences. For example, life experience on a day-to-day basis seems to be creditable for making people “more intelligent.” Then there is the impact of literacy that at a common sense level appears to be powerful enough to account for the development of mental processes. To control for those influences Scribner and Cole (1981) found the appropriate populations among the Vai people of Liberia: Groups of people essentially similar except that some only had the benefits of life experience, others of life experience and literacy, and still others of the latter two in addition to formal schooling. Using tests derived from native culture, they adduced evidence to show that formal education does make a significant difference. In particular, the cognitive superiority associated with schooling was exhibited in the domains of logical reasoning, and especially of verbal explanation. They attributed the advantages of the formally schooled subjects to such teacher practices as asking students to justify a solution or explain an answer.

This study and others give reason to believe that schooling in its current form promotes cognitive growth, but primarily as a by-product and rarely as a result of a clearly defined goal of enhancing children’s thought processes. Probably the same may be said about educational and quasi-educational social agencies over the life span, including those for the aged – that they may have a salutary effect on stimulating and maintaining cognitive processes, although without that end being an explicit objective. Considering that even in the absence of such conscious commitment measurable gains are nonetheless achieved, it seems reasonable to expect more than that when facilitation of change becomes an operational goal.

Aspects of the Social Role

This section highlights four major functions of the social role in promoting cognitive growth. In one form or another these four are prominent features of subsequent chapters: mediation; fostering self-regulation and metacognition; assessment of short-range growth possibilities; and cultivating critical and creative thinking. We will discuss them in that order.

Mediation

The long prevailing belief that development precedes learning has been challenged by the following opposing view: learning stimulates development that, in turn, leads to more advanced learning, which leads to further development, and so forth, in a continuing spiral fashion. The latter view – that learning comes first – opens the door wider than ever to the possibility of influencing development through education. It encourages the design of educational experience for the express purpose of enhancing cognitive growth. In such newly designed programs the concept of mediation achieves prominence.

The term mediation in this context refers to the social role of assisting individuals to perceive and interpret their environment. One person, the mediator, helps another recognize significant physical or social features, either in contemporary or past experience, by filtering and organizing those features. Instead of the initial randomized appearance of stimuli in the environment, relationships among them of a causal, spatial, or temporal nature become apparent. In short, the mediator aids the individual in making sense of the universe.

To sharpen the meaning of the concept, one can picture fictional Martians landing in Times Square in New York City or in other equally distracting settings. To help them acquire meaning of their environment the mediator would direct their attention to the significant aspects of the environment, namely, people and theaters rather than pigeons. In like manner, parents, as mediators, begin to help children make sense of their experience.

As an illustration of the concept, we can imagine a child in a museum of art, confronted by a vast array of stimuli. What paintings or sculptures are to be looked at out of the hundreds? And in examining any one of them, what in particular should be noted? What relationships exist among them in temporal sequence, content, or style? What meaning is the artist conveying and how does it relate to the child’s knowledge, that is, to what the child has already assimilated? These questions about significance, relationships, and meanings can be adapted to countless situations at virtually all periods in the life span. It may occur when a high school student is reading a difficult assignment, when a young adult is confronted with problems at work, or an older adult with decisions about retirement. Mediation in any of these situations occurs when another person helps the individual address these or similar questions, not by providing answers but by widening options, often by challenging the individual to look at the stimuli in new ways. A recent study of 5-year-old children who shared in decision making about the most efficient routes through a model grocery illustrates the benefits of mediation. Whether these children collaborated actively with peers or their mothers, later, in the posttest, they were more likely to engage in advance planning and to produce more efficient routes than those children who either worked alone or did little if any sharing in decision making (Gauvain & Rogoff, 1989).

From birth, humans experience the benefits of mediation. For some, the quantity and quality of mediation in childhood were inadequate. For them, special programs, like those devised by Reuven Feuerstein and described in part 2 (Feuerstein & Hoffman, chap. 6), compensate for the deficiency at least in part. As noted in the examples given earlier, this form of the social role is not restricted to childhood. Any type of instruction, formal or informal, in which people (teachers, counselors, therapists) interpose themselves between the environment and the individual, represents mediation. This includes courses to enhance creative thinking in university students, as described by Howard Gruber and Lucien Richard (chap. 7), or in older adults, as presented by Jacqui Smith and Paul Baltes (c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• Chapter 1 Introduction: The Social Role in Promoting Cognitive Growth Over the Life Span
• Part I Conceptual Issues in Promoting Cognitive Growth
• Part II Programs to Promote Cognitive Growth and Programmatic Issues
• Author Index
• Subject Index