Education Theories
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Suggested topics: Structural Cognitive Modifiability. SCM is the foundation theory of Reuven Feuerstein, a student of Piaget and the tutor of Piaget's children. In this theory, Feuerstein asserts that intelligence is not fixed, but modifiable. He disagrees with his mentor's notion that learning will come naturally with exposure to the environment. Feuerstein asserts that learning is expanded, enriched and accelerated when a parent, teacher or other care-giver mediates the learning experience and helps the child become more efficient in the thinking processes. Feuerstein tells the story of the two parents in the park with their children. In the one case, the parent sits on a bench and reads while the child plays and explores the play area. In the other case, the parent notices a bird in a tree. She focuses her child's attention on the bird and asks questions that arouse the child's interest and have the child distinguish the bird as a unique object. In the second case, the parent mediates the child's learning experience.
Feuerstein lists 26 cognitive functions which he calls the pre-requisites to effective learning. When deficient or underdeveloped, children underperform in tasks which require thinking, especially in school. Some of the deficient functions are impulsivity, blurred perception, imprecision, lack of logic. When a deficiency is present, the child has difficulty in use of the thinking operations such as comparing, sequencing, hypothesizing.
With proper mediation the child's thinking changes, not just as an operation, but as a structure in the brain. Brain reseearch is showing the actual organic changes that occur as the modifications are made and the student is able to think smarter. In Feuerstein's definition of intelligence, the child who is now thinking smarter with structural changes that are part of the brain system is operating with a modified intelligence.
Why is this important theory important? First, it challenges the common belief that intelligence is fixed and unchangeable as argued by those who follow the psychometric view. Second, it allows for the development of Feuerstein's second theory, the theory and practice of Mediated Learning Experience described above and third, it changes the practices of schools that use the Bell Curve to track, grade and classify students.
Constructivism and Constructionism
[edit] See Also
[Engaged Learning]
