Success in school depends on many personal and social factors, but two of these factors matter the most:
the student’s current knowledge and skills
the student’s reasoning abilities using verbal, quantitative, and spatial concepts
CogAT measures reasoning abilities in all three domains—verbal, quantitative, and nonverbal—which is why it is so helpful in guiding efforts to adapt instruction and improve learning outcomes. This section summarizes the following research-based principles that guide instructional adaptation:
build on strength
focus on working memory
scaffold wisely
encourage strategic thinking
when grouping, aim for diversity
The remainder of this topic offers suggestions based on these principles and specific to a student’s CogAT ability profile.
When a student is weak in one area but strong in another, a general rule is to build on the strength. Students are better able to process information when tasks emphasize the type of thinking they do best.
When adapting instruction to build on strengths, follow these guidelines:
Instruction geared to a strength should challenge that strength. It should encourage students to go beyond the information given, not merely register it.
Frequently, students must learn to perform tasks that they do not do well. In such cases, emphasize aspects of the tasks that avoid their weakness until the students have established a foothold.
For example, consider students who have difficulty learning computation skills but who show strength in verbal reasoning. Using group oral recitation and encouraging students to talk through math problems will emphasize their verbal strength more than silent practice on computation.
When students are required to remember and do more things than they are capable of remembering and doing at one time, they generally fail. In cognitive terms, their working memory is overloaded.
As they learn, students must understand, temporarily store, and then transform new information in some way. All three of these processes require working memory, which is a limited resource.
Effective use of working memory is critical for successful reasoning. Students cannot make inferences about how two or more ideas are connected if they cannot hold the ideas in their working memory while trying to compare them.
Indicators that a student’s working memory is overloaded include the following:
inability to recall and complete a list of oral instructions
skipping or repeating parts of a task
task abandonment and frustration
Working memory has a limited capacity. When helping students who are unfamiliar with a task or who have difficulty learning, aim to reduce the burden on working memory while maintaining the integrity of the lesson content.
Two important questions for educators to ask are:
“What are the major demands that this activity places on the students’ working memories?”
“Which of these memory requirements can be offloaded or scaffolded?”
Whenever students try to solve problems, many processes must be executed simultaneously in working memory. Scaffolding wisely means offloading, at least for the moment, those memory requirements and processes that are not the object of the instructional activity.
For example, the demands of spelling and grammar can easily overwhelm the working memory resources of a beginning writer. Temporarily offloading these demands frees the student to write a connected narrative.
Similarly, one of the last steps in the acquisition of skills is learning to monitor one’s own performance. Especially in the early stages of skill acquisition, monitoring functions can be offloaded to another individual by having students work in pairs. Using checklists, writing things down, drawing pictures, and practicing a skill until it can be performed automatically also reduce demands on working memory.
When working with students who have difficulty making inferences, deductions, and elaborations, avoid the temptation to make things easy by offloading the reasoning requirements of the tasks. This strategy works well in the short run but leaves students increasingly unprepared to face future challenges of school learning. When reasoning is an essential part of a task, find ways to support and guide learners without offloading their need to reason.
Psychologists who study reasoning distinguish between two types of reasoning processes:
Tacit processes occur outside awareness. They typically do not require much attention and are performed quickly and intuitively.
Intentional processes require conscious awareness. Intentional thinking is often described as effortful and rule-based.
For example, skilled readers use tacit reasoning processes to understand much of what they read. They retrieve word meanings quickly and automatically build mental images that help them keep track of the meaning of a passage as they move from one sentence to the next.
Beginning readers, on the other hand, use intentional reasoning processes to understand the meaning of both individual words and of the sentences that they make, often relying on illustrations rather than their own mental imagery.
Reasoning processes are most useful when students learn to use them strategically. At the lowest level, this means simply having a strategy that one can consciously use when necessary. At an intermediate level, it means having multiple strategies available for possible use. At a more advanced level, it means knowing under which circumstances each strategy is best used. And at the highest level, it means becoming strategic and reflective in one’s thinking.
Instructional adaptations are most effective over the long haul if they help learners become more intentional and self-regulated in their learning. Encouraging students to use and monitor the effectiveness of different strategies helps them better leverage their strengths and avoid, or scaffold, their weaknesses.
CogAT results should not be used to routinely group students by score levels or by ability profiles. Students are most likely to improve their ability in a domain if they have the benefit of learning from classmates whose skills and approaches to problems differ from their own.
Working with students of different ability levels is particularly important for students who have a marked deficit in one area. Improvement is more likely if such students have high-quality interactions with individuals who have a relative strength in the same area than if they are constantly paired with other students who, like themselves, have difficulty in that domain.
More-able students benefit from such groups to the extent that they are asked to provide explanations and assistance. Note, however, that highly academically talented students can benefit from being grouped with other high-ability students in classes that offer advanced or accelerated learning.