Cognitive Skills Essential in Education
Cognitive skills such as memory, visual processing, auditory processing, thinking, sensory integration, and attention are connected like a spider web. They are very integrated and built together. And you can imagine that if you have a spider web where there are bits of weak spots, the spider will tend to rely on the parts that are stronger while it builds the weaker parts. It’s the same thing in our brain. Our neural network looks very similar to the web. Thus, our children (and even ourselves) tend to rely on our strengths because they (we) can’t rely on their (our) weaknesses. So if our children have cognitive gaps in their abilities, they will only rely on the remaining strengths to get by. However, just like the spider web, our neural web’s weak spots can be strengthened so that our children can use all of those skills to learn.
Most times we see children performing well all the way in their lower primary years but alas, when they hit the upper primary or secondary years, they just couldn’t take the massive amount of content that is delivered at a much faster speed. This is when parents start to see the weaknesses in their children’s neural web.
The fact is we can’t open up our brains to know what the weak spots are. But with cognitive tests we can assess accurately the child’s weak cognitive areas – working memory, long-term memory, visualizing difficulties, short attention spans etc. An unmotivated student may be so because of a weak cognitive area that needs rectifying not simply due to attitude. His or her weaknesses in processing content due to a cognitive weakness can severely stunt motivation in the child.
Schools generally assume children come with the necessary cognitive skills, and thereby delivering the content for processing. Here, I want to assure you that cognitive skills can improve with training. There are many ways to improve cognition. Improved cognitive skills in turn lead to accelerated academic growth.
Get to know your child’s cognitive strengths and weaknesses! Sharpening your child’s cognitive abilities is always part of our enrichment activities in our Analytical Critical Thinking curriculum.
