Can We Teach Intelligence?

A Comprehensive Evaluation of Feuerstein's Instrumental Enrichment Programme

Nigel Blagg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136471360
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This compelling book provides one of the most comprehensive and detailed evaluations of a very popular cognitive skills course -- Reuven Feuerstein's Instrumental Enrichment Programme. Feuerstein claims that his program, a model for diagnosing and remedying cognitive deficiencies in poor attainers, can equip pupils with the basic prerequisites of thinking, thereby enabling them to become more effective learners. Combining innovative and traditional experimental techniques, this text analyzes both teacher and pupil outcomes on a wide range of issues including abilities, accomplishments, and behavioral characteristics. The implications of the study are set against theoretical and practical issues involved in other popular intellectual skills training programs. "Real world" concerns that have been largely ignored by research literature are addressed, as are their effects on the teaching of thinking skills.

Chapter 1

Teaching Cognitive Skills—
Issues Past and Present

You teach science; well and good; I am busy fashioning the tools for its acquisition. . . . It is not your business to teach him the various sciences, but to give him a taste for them and methods of learning them when this taste is more mature.

Rousseau (1762, pp. 90 & 134)

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES

The idea of teaching children to be better learners is not new. It was debated by Socrates and Plato and has been espoused by educationalists and philosophers throughout the centuries. Indeed, some teachers (especially in the humanities) have adopted Socratic methods, in which pupils are prompted to question their basic assumptions and premises in the hope that they will ultimately internalize and generalize the teacher's self-questioning model.

Of course, there have always been those who have proclaimed the wider benefits of learning particular subjects. For many, subjects like mathematics, logic, and/or Latin have provided a vehicle for “training the mind” or in current terms teaching children to “learn how to learn.” Nevertheless, teaching children how to become better learners has been rarely featured as a central, coordinated, curricular aim in our schools.

At the beginning of this century, the study skills movement flirted with the idea of teaching learning techniques in a variety of books (cited in Nisbet & Shucksmith, 1986, pp. 13 & 14). Since then, numerous study skills manuals have been published. However, 60 years on, although most manuals are superior in presentation, they contain nothing new. As Nisbet and Shucksmith (1986) emphasize, intuitive ideas of many years ago have become enduring truths without any theoretical or empirical basis. At a practical level, advice tends to be too general to be of use and in any case, applied too late at 16–17 years when habits and learning routines are already established. All too often, study skills amount to no more than a ragbag of tips for passing examinations or coping with specific routines in particular subjects.

More promising lines of approach are now beginning to emerge in the developmental/cognitive psychology fields, although ironically earlier notions about intelligence and learning hampered serious attempts to teach cognitive skills. For most of this century the school curriculum has been strongly influenced by Piagetian theory, psychometrics, and behaviorism. Piaget's pioneering work on the child's emerging cognitive capabilities emphasized important stages in conceptual development. During the first stage, dominated by sensory motor experiences, the baby develops an identity separate from the rest of the world. Later, the infant establishes object permanence and conservations of number, shape, volume, and so on.

Eventually, through a process of assimilation and accommodation the child begins to build up a comprehensive and predictable model of the world, which eventually enables abstract, hypothetical thinking. Piaget regarded cognitive development as a necessary prerequisite for learning rather than an outcome of educational experience. For him, the child's unfolding, reasoning abilities were largely biologically determined and the role and significance of social interaction in cognitive development was neglected. Nevertheless, he emphasized the importance of a stimulating environment with educational opportunities tailored to the child's developmental stage. In infant schools this led to “happening environments,” experimental learning, and notions such as reading readiness. Unfortunately, however, it also led to a passive acceptance approach to many children who were slow to progress, encapsulated by: “They'll learn when they are ready.”

Psychometrics (the business of measuring behavior and the abilities underlying it) began with Sir Francis Galton, founder of the Eugenics movement. Galton's (1869) survey of 1,000 men and their relatives demonstrated that “intellectually eminent” scientists, writers, judges, and so on tended to have similarly “eminent” close relatives and moreover, as the blood ties between relatives grew weaker, the frequency of occurrence of eminent relatives decreased. Galton concluded that intelligence was largely inherited and went on to devise simple tests of mental efficiency (e.g., reaction time and sensory discrimination tasks). Galton's work was developed in the early part of the century by Karl Pearson (a statistician) and Charles Spearman (a psychologist) who did much to promote the idea of “general intelligence” as a unitary ability underlying successful performance in many different tasks.

Of course, this notion of general intelligence as a unitary faculty has been challenged by some psychologists who have suggested that intelligent behavior relates to a number of underlying, fixed separate sources of individual differences known as factors. For instance, Thurstone (1938), held that intelligence was a function of seven primary mental abilities (verbal comprehension, verbal fluency, number, spatial visualization, reasoning, memory, and perceptual speed). Vernon (1971) regarded intelligence as hierarchical, with general intelligence (g) being underpinned by verbal-educational ability and practical mechanical ability, with performance in these two domains being influenced by numerous finer and increasingly specific skills. More recently, Gardner (1983) has proposed a theory of multiple intelligences in which individual performance is an outcome of seven different intelligences (linguistic, musical, logical, mathematical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, and personal).

Theoretical ideas about intelligence have fuelled the psychometric test industry, spawning the production of numerous procedures designed to provide stable indices of children's intellectual abilities. Galton's early notions of inherited intelligence have become pervasive and enduring. Moreover, the hypothetical construct “intelligence” has become inextricably intertwined with attempts to measure it. Thus, for many, IQ scores have become equated with a fixed quantity of intelligence within the child, leading to particular expectations and self-fulfilling prophecies. In spite of numerous research studies indicating the influence of educational experience on IQ's (Clarke & Clarke, 1976), outmoded notions about the invariant nature of IQ's and intelligence still persist in some educational circles.

In retrospect, it is interesting that one of the earliest constructors of mental tests (Alfred Binet, 1857–1911) was not so much interested in measuring the intellectual potential of pupils, as concerned to identify slow learners in need of remediation. He rejected the idea of intelligence as a unitary faculty and regarded it as being made up of numerous smaller modifiable functions such as observation, memory, judgment, attention, and so on. He strongly protested against the pessimism associated with fixed notions of intelligence and set out to demonstrate that intelligent behavior could be trained with his program of “mental orthopaedics.”

Nevertheless, it is the notion of assessing rather than teaching cognitive abilities that has captivated the educational and psychological world for the majority of this century. Many would argue that psychometrics have been useful for predictive purposes or the analysis of individual strengths and weaknesses, but nowadays even these functions are being called into question. The overgeneralization of IQ tests to population groups for whom they were not devised or standardized has caused a backlash in some parts of the world. For instance, in certain USA states traditional IQs have been outlawed on grounds of their cultural bias. The need to find more effective, appropriate, and fairer ways of assessing individuals of varying abilities from many different cultures has led to an increased emphasis on nonverbal tests that are allegedly based on culture-fair or culture-free items. In spite of this, however, problems remain with many of the procedures because of inappropriate assumptions about the nature of intelligence and assessment.

The dangers of psychometrics led many educationalists to embrace behaviorism. Early behaviorists avoiding examining internal, hypothetical processes that defied measurement and concentrated instead on immediately observable interactions between the individual and the environment. Behaviorism has been responsible for programmed learning, task and curriculum analysis, precision teaching, behavioral objectives approaches, and a shift from normative assessment procedures to criterion referenced approaches. However, although behaviorism has made significant contributions to the teaching of basic skill hierarchies and the management of certain kinds of behavioral difficulties, it has not been able to tackle more complex behavior. In contrast to the Piagetian approach, the behavioral focus on task and curriculum analysis has deflected attention away from the need to examine cognitive competencies within the child. However, in common with the Piagetian approach, it has overlooked the critical role of social interaction in learning and development. For instance. Skinner's operate conditioning paradigm reduces people to mere dispensers of reinforcement while ignoring the subtle complexities of human interaction.

RECENT DEVELOPMENTS

Of course, there have been many overlapping and interacting developments in the fields of cognitive psychology, psychometrics, and behaviorism. For instance, behaviorism has broadened its scope with the various techniques developed in the 1960s now being seen as a set of resources to be deployed as part of a sensitive and comprehensive problem solving approach (Blagg, 1987). Moreover, with the emergence of the cognitive behavior therapy movement in particular, it is beginning to be acceptable to consider and analyze feelings and internal processes.

Meichenbaum (1985) illustrated how “a set of strange bedfellows” were brought together to give rise to a particular cognitive-behavioral training approach. He mentions the influence of social learning theory and in particular, the finding that children's cognitive strategies help them to delay gratification and control their behavior. He cites related research in the early 1970s, demonstrating that impulsive children were not so much intrinsically impulsive but rather, lacked certain self-mediating cognitive strategies that caused them to stop and think. This connected with the work of the Soviet psychologists, Luria (1961) and Vygotsky (1962). Luria (1959) proposed three stages of development in which children gradually learned to control their motor behavior. It was hypothesized that in the first stage, very young children were controlled by the speech of others (mainly adults). In the second stage, their own overt speech began to regulate and mediate their behavior until finally, in the third stage, “inner” speech took on a self-regulatory function.

It was on the basis of this model that Meichenbaum and Goodman (1971) developed their cognitive-behavior modification (CMB) training approach, which has led to a range of related procedures sharing a number of common features:

• The child is very actively involved in the learning process.

• Some form of “self talk” is typically encouraged, including positive self-affirmations, questioning tactics and prompts to promote caution where necessary.

• The teacher models the kinds of behaviors needed by the learner.

• In the course of training, the teacher's explicit verbalizations are overtly— and subsequently, covertly—copied and practiced until the learner begins to regulate his or her own behavior without external prompts.

This kind of self-instructional training has proved useful with impulsive children (Meichenbaum & Goodman, 1971) although benefits have tended to be restricted to specific training contexts (i.e., transfer and generalization have been elusive). Perhaps this is not surprising as training procedures have been closely tied to particular tasks and notions of the transitions from external speech to inner thought have been rather simplistic. Meichenbaum (1977) acknowledged these problems and suggested a number of ways in which transfer might be enhanced. Many CMB manuals have now been published which include promising suggestions in need of further study and elaboration.

In the psychometric field, the Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities (ITPA) caused a wave of excitement in the early 1960s by providing a model for assessing and teaching deficiencies in skills regarded as essential for learning. Unfortunately, the early promise of the ITPA movement turned out to be an illusion. The ITPA training programs (Kirk, McCarthey, & Kirk, 1968) did not lead to general improvements in attainments or learning abilities. Moreover, fundamental weaknesses in the assumptions underlying the ability training model were detailed by Ysseldyke and Salvia (1974); Hammill and Larsen (1974); Newcomer, Larsen, and Hammill (1975). As Bradley (1983) pointed out:

disillusion and disappointment were widespread. More tragic than that disappointment was the fact that children were the victims of an iatrogenic educational programme, one that deprived them of potentially effective instruction while they were being subjected to interventions that excited the educators but that were of unproven effectiveness . . . (p. 81)

These convincing critical appraisals led to the widespread abandonment of ability training procedures based on the ITPA. On a wider scale, the psychometric model has not been useful in suggesting ways of training intelligent behavior. Factors such as verbal comprehension or reasoning, simply do not tell us what it is that should be trained (Sternberg, 1985).

For these and other reasons, there is now a growing interest in dynamic approaches to intellectual assessment and a useful review of the state of the art can be found in Lidz (1987). More than 50 years ago Vygotsky (1935/1978a) talked about the need to identify the child's “zone of proximal development,” which he defined as “the distance between the actual (mental) developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential (mental) development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers” (Vygotsky 1935/1978a, pp. 85–86).

Quite independently in the 1950s and 1960s, Feuerstein and his colleagues were talking in similar terms about the need to assess a child's potential for learning by carefully analyzing the amount and nature of mediation required to help a child acquire a new concept, idea or skill. Over a number of years, the Feuerstein team have been experimenting with alternative ways of assessing an individual's potential for learning. Their approaches have evolved into an experimental package of materials known as the Learning Potential Assessment Device (LPAD) the basis of which is explicated in the Dynamic Assessment of Retarded Performers (Feuerstein, Rand, & Hoffman, 1979). Task types are rather similar to IQ and aptitude tests but, the traditional, formal approach to assessment in which the examiner is constrained by standardized instructions has been transformed into an interactional approach in which the examiner plays a crucial mediational role.

In summary, a much more optimistic view of human development currently prevails. The Vygotskyan premise that intellectual development is an outcome of educational experience now overrides the more pessimistic, biologically based Piagetian view. Thus, active learning approaches that consciously attempt to change an individual's cognitive skills are now gaining favor over a passive acceptance approach to individuals with learning problems. The role of social interaction as a crucial developmental force is now being recognized alongside the self-regulatory functions of language.

THINKING ABOUT THINKING

Since Flavell (1977) coined the term metacognition (referring to an individual's conscious awareness of his own thought processes) there has been an explosive growth in research on “thinking about thinking.” It has been demonstrated that young children and low achievers are less able than adults or high achievers to talk about techniques and methods of learning and problem solving employed in specific tasks (Campione, Brown, & Ferrara, 1982). The implication is that if learners can become more aware of their own thought processes and learning strategies, they could not only widen their repertoire of such strategies, but also gain conscious control over them (i.e., by knowing when to select a...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• FOREWORD
• INTRODUCTION
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• 1. TEACHING COGNITIVE SKILLS—ISSUES PAST AND PRESENT
• 2. FEUERSTEIN’S BELIEFS, THEORIES, ASSESSMENT MODEL, AND INTERVENTION PROGRAM
• 3. INSTRUMENTAL ENRICHMENT EVALUATION DESIGN
• 4. THE PUPILS
• 5. THE TEACHERS
• 6. REVIEW AND DISCUSSION OF THE MAIN FINDINGS
• 7. WIDER IMPLICATIONS
• APPENDICES
• REFERENCES
• AUTHOR INDEX
• SUBJECT INDEX