Cognition, Education, and Deafness: Directions for Research and Instruction

Can Thinking Skills Be Incorporated into a Curriculum?

Can Thinking Skills Be Incorporated into a Curriculum? Cindy Rohr-Redding Teachers who work with hearing-impaired adolescents frequently express deep concern and frustration about some of their students' serious deficiencies in problem solving. Student performance in both classroom discussions and written work indicates that students (a) are unable to organize and synthesize information for taking tests, (b) do not spontaneously compare and apply information across subject areas, (c) cannot follow written and oral directions without demonstration, (d) do not read between and beyond the lines, (e) have difficulty in seeing relationships between assignments, and (f) are not able to generalize the information learned in the classroom to life experiences. Previous studies have established these concerns as valid. Hearing-impaired children have demonstrated specific cognitive deficiencies in such areas as memory (Karchmer & Belmont, 1976), concept application (Meadow, 1980), opposition (Furth, 1964; Meadow, 1980), analogic reasoning (Meadow, 1980), superordinate reasoning Oohnson, 1981), and classification (Best & Roberts, 1975). However, both Furth and Meadow have found that hearing-impaired learners perform as well as hearing children on cognitive tasks such as understanding parts versus wholes. Thus, we see normal performance by hearing-impaired children on some cognitive tasks and not others. If we accept the evidence that some cognitive deficiencies do exist for hearing-impaired individuals but that no evidence suggests less than the normal range of intellectual potential among the hearing impaired, it is apparent that a cognitive intervention program used in an educational setting might promise improvement of these skills. Instrumental Enrichment (IE) was developed by Reuven Feuerstein (1978, 1980) in response to the need for mediated learning experiences to facilitate the development of thinking skills among culturally disadvantaged groups emigrating to Israel. A mediated learning experience is a process by which an experienced person selects and interprets the stimuli impinging on a learner. While mediating, IE teachers often use such phrases as, "You should continue to look for the best answer," or "Your strategy is not working; think of another way to solve the problem." Instrumental Enrichment consists of content-free paper-and-pencil activities relating to 14 specific cognitive functions. This program provides an excellent tool for instruction (especially in relation to the results of those studies cited earlier) for the following reasons: 1. It gives the students repeated opportunities to reflect on their own thinking processes. Students in the program have begun comparing The complete version of this paper is available in microfiche or hard copy from ERIC Document Reproduction Service. Ask for Document No. ED 247 729. 168 different strategies they have used to arrive at the same answer or are contemplating the need to change strategies midstream when trying to reach a solution. 2. It develops the prerequisites for learning and does not assume that those prerequisites already exist. 3. It does not assume that the student will automatically generalize the skill to other areas. Instead, the teacher overtly and actively promotes transfer by the student of skills to both real life and curricular situations through classroom bridging exercises. (Classroom activities integrating IE with subject matter occur at least twice per week.) For example, two areas of emphasis in the first year of the program are the reduction of impulsivity and the need to be precise. In discussing the application of these strategies in relation to the subject area, the teacher would ask the students to explain one way that their impulsiveness in completing a homework assignment resulted in having incorrect answers; or the teacher would ask students to identify another strategy that the main character in the story might have used to more efficiently and accurately resolve the conflict in the story. A strong validation of the importance of training students in intellectual skills is made by Sternberg (1983); he has listed several criteria that any worthwhile training program should meet. Among them is the importance of training students in strategies, and he specifically mentions Feuerstein's Instrumental Enrichment as a successful example of such a program. A special 2-year pilot project at the Model Secondary School for the Deaf (Washington, D.C.) studied a control group of 17 students and an experimental group of 10 students using measures of cognitive functioning to assess the success of this systematic intervention program. (The paper in this volume by Jonas & Martin, pp. 172-175, describes in more detail the results of a later and more extensive study using the same program.) The experimental and control groups were matched on the basis of age, sex, degree of...