cognitive acceleration

DEVELOPING CHILDREN'S THINKING

Submission to the National Curriculum Review

The below text was submitted by email to all members of the review committee on behalf of the CA Tutor Forum based at Kings College, London and we would welcome your feedback on the content of our proposal. Download the full submission here.

the remit of the review

Since the introduction of the National Curriculum and statutory tests in the early 1990s, teachers have been increasingly required to use a target-centred model of teaching in which acquisition of knowledge and skills is verified by frequent assessment and by tracking, with repetition and coaching until ‘improvement’ has been achieved. One symptom of this is the modularisation of GCSE, AS and A Level courses by which examinations may be and are taken repeatedly.

Government has recognised that this functionalist approach to teaching has not produced the higher achievement expected of it. International surveys confirm that education in England is not as successful as in some other countries and there is robust evidence of a decline in intellectual development since the implementation of the National Curriculum testing regime (Shayer, Coe, & Ginsburg 2007; Shayer & Ginsburg 2009).

One of the aims of the current curriculum review is “to allow teachers the freedom to use their professionalism and expertise in order to help all children realise their potential” [Review of the National Curriculum in England : Remit, para 3] and “… to give teachers greater professional freedom over how they organise and teach the curriculum.”  [para 6].

“The Government envisages schools and teachers taking greater control over what is taught in schools and how it is taught, using their professional skills and experience to provide the best educational experience for all their pupils. … teachers need the space to create lessons which engage their pupils, and children need the time to develop their ability to understand, retain and apply what they have learnt.” [para 9]

The review therefore aims to reduce prescription and to re-establish teaching and learning as matters of professional expertise.

But how to do it?

We wholeheartedly support this revival of a focus on teacher professionalism. However, we are concerned that after 20 years of innovation overload, teachers will be expected to raise standards of achievement without guidance on how this is to be achieved. The Schools White Paper envisages that the quality of teaching will be improved by new teachers being chiefly trained in the classroom by successful experienced teachers [2.20 – 2.25]. But experienced mentors can only train new teachers in existing teaching methods, not new ones.  If current teaching methods are not sufficiently effective, they can only be improved by change, not by passing them on to new teachers however skillfully.

We have shown over many years and on a significant scale that a well-established route to raising the quality of learning of all of our students is to focus on their fundamental reasoning or ‘thinking’ powers, and we propose that the National Curriculum should include, if not as a statutory requirement then at least as firm guidance linked to OfSTED approval, a strong recommendation of the teaching of thinking within each of the core subjects.

a place for reasoning in the national curriculum

The explicit aim of Government policy is to ensure that English schools provide an education at least as good as those of the world’s most successful educational systems.  Schools will therefore have to ensure that young people develop the higher-level thinking skills needed in knowledge-based economies including creativity, critical reflection, problem-solving and decision-making.  However, this development will require a major change of teaching culture - from the assessment-driven approach required of schools for 20 years to a creative one which stimulates pupils’ cognitive abilities.  Assessment-driven teaching is now so fully established in schools that this change will not come about without providing a proven framework for creative and stimulating teaching from which, supported by appropriate professional development, teachers can develop their creative skills.

As a group originating in research based at King’s College London, we now have 40 years of experience of analysing the thinking abilities of the school population and 30 years of devising interventions to enhance the general reasoning ability of all students. These interventions are collectively known as Cognitive Acceleration (CA). Since 1991 we have published a series of studies showing the positive effects of teaching for better thinking on levels of cognitive development and on academic achievement as measured by existing examinations (KS2, KS3, and GCSE).

For example, a varied group of 13 schools using Cognitive Acceleration in Science (CASE) in Years 7 and 8 subsequently showed gains a whole grade in GCSE compared to controls, not only in science but also in English and mathematics (Adey & Shayer 1994; also Shayer 2003). In another project, children using CA methods in Years 1 and 2 in two contrasting LAs (Hammersmith and Bournemouth) showed, 4 years later, significant gains in KS2 English levels (Shayer & Adhami 2010). These are examples from a substantial body of research published in peer-reviewed academic journals and books. A full list of this research, and also of the many CA schemes available for teachers from Early Years through to Year 8, in Science, Mathematics, English, and The Arts is available at:
 www.kcl.ac.uk/schools/sspp/education/research/projects/cognitive  

Numerous more recent examples of CA’s effectiveness can be given: for example, at Grafton School in North London following CA Maths intervention, the proportion of pupils achieving level 5 in the KS2 test rose from 18 per cent in 2002 to 56 per cent in 2006 (Times Educational Supplement 2007). Grafton School is part of a cluster of primary schools in the North Islington Education Action Zone  which used CAME as part of their curriculum for a number of years and where the “standards of achievement rose significantly”according to independent analysis of data (see http://www.fischertrust.org/news.aspx).  

CA is designed for the full range of ability and has a very successful track record with the middle 90% of the ability range. For the upper and lower 5%s, teachers who have understood the fundamental principles are able to make appropriate adjustments.  CA operates at a deeper level than specific curriculum objectives or work schemes, providing the general reasoning power necessary for achieving those objectives.

All CA programmes rely on three main principles:

1.    Creating challenge: ensuring that the task at hand is a little beyond students’ current capability, so they must reach out, mentally, to solve problems. This not only stretches the mind, but proves to be motivating.
2.    Dialogue: in common with many excellent approaches to teaching, we emphasise the importance of students talking to one another, listening, arguing constructively, and being prepared to justify their position.
3.    Reflection: time to look back on what one has learned, how one has learned it, and what lessons about learning have been learned proves to be the third powerful driver of effective intellectual development and learning.

These are principles are embedded in the five-part structure which forms CA. We know of only three other programmes which, like CA, have produced repeated evidence of substantial long-term gains in academic achievement: Philosophy for Children, Feuerstein’s Instrumental Enrichment and Klauer’s Inductive Reasoning. But these are all stand-alone thinking programmes requiring their own time in the curriculum. Only Cognitive Acceleration is infused into curriculum subjects.

changing the culture of teaching

We believe that the most effective way of bringing about the desired change in English education is for schools to devote 10 per cent of their teaching time to delivering elements of the core curriculum in ways that explicitly enhance pupils’ cognitive abilities.  This would apply to Key Stages 1, 2 and 3.  For this, schools will need suites of fully trialled and highly effective materials together with training in their delivery.  Such materials already exist or are under active development and collectively we have many years of experience of running PD courses for teachers on thinking which make a demonstrable difference to students’ learning.

Beginning with established creative and innovative programmes for a minority of their time, teachers will develop the expertise and confidence to use the same approach in their other teaching.  Teachers of non-core subjects will use materials where they exist and work together with others to develop their own materials and approaches.

In order to be recommended, we believe that such a programme must have five features:

CA fulfils all these requirements.  In particular, it is exemplified in sets of fully trialled curriculum materials which provide the experience of cognitive enhancement for students, but teachers need to understand the CA principles to use them effectively.  With this understanding, they are able to develop their own CA materials in response to their school’s curriculum. 

Unlike other thinking programmes, CA is subject-based although it enhances general intelligence and increases students’ achievement in other subjects.  This means that it can be used as part of schemes of work and can lead to written outcomes through bridging if the school wishes.

A particular advantage is that delivering CA inevitably involves Assessment for Learning (AfL) methods.  It is well established that AfL increases pupils’ achievement, but teachers appear to have difficulty in adopting AfL as part of their teaching style as it is free-standing and unrelated to content.  It seems to require a good deal of self-confidence and/or mutual support and is most successful when adopted on a whole school basis [DFES 2007].  On the other hand, CA provides suites of fully trialled materials and it is not possible to deliver CA effectively without using AfL because many elements of AfL are inherent in it; for example, the use of open-ended questions to provoke and guide discussion, development of understanding through discussion, acceptance that different views of a subject are useful, wait time, irrelevance of putting hands up to answer questions, and peer- and self-assessment of pupils’ thinking processes (metacognition).

Finally, CA is effective with pupils of all abilities and all social and ethnic origins.  Similar gains are made by pupils in inner-city, suburban and rural comprehensive schools, independent schools and a selective schools.  Adey and Shayer write: “Those who made the greatest gains in academic achievement were not confined either to those who started from a low level and might therefore be thought to have much to make up, nor to those who were more able to start with and so might have been considered to be ‘ready’ for the development of formal operations. High gainers came from the full range of starting abilities.” (pages 102/103)

on assessment

It is a well-known paradox in education that the most important outcomes (motivation, attitudes, morals, reasoning power) are very difficult to assess reliably, and under present arrangements there is a risk that what is not assessed will not be taught. We are not here advocating the direct measurement of cognitive (thinking) ability, but we are confident, on the basis of 30 years of research, that attention to the teaching of reasoning within the core subject areas does produce demonstrable gains in academic achievement in those subjects as normally assessed.

Two specific proposals
1.         To include the development of learners’ cognitive abilities in the National Curriculum, initially for 10 per cent of their experience of the core subjects at Key Stages 1, 2 and 3, through appropriately designed activities which both enhance intelligence and teach key topics and concepts in the subject.

2.         To recognise that this development requires a change of pedagogy which will need to be guided and supported by a programme of Professional Development for teachers at individual, department, and school levels. This will enable teachers to plan and create new reasoning activities in their subjects, core and others so that, with trial and reflection on practice, enhancement of thinking skills will become an established part of teaching and learning.

next steps

We would be happy to meet with the Expert Panel or Advisory Panel at their convenience to answer any questions or to demonstrate the CA materials. We can arrange for interested parties to observe CA in action in primary and secondary schools.

Philip Adey (Science), Emeritus Professor, King’s College London
Dr Christine Harrison (Science), Senior Lecturer, King’s College London
Mundher Adhami (Mathematics), former Research Associate, King’s College London
Laurie Smith (English), Research Associate, King’s College London

references