Ensuring that all students can learn

Nechoma Schwab

Psychotherapist and Metacognitive Specialist

What if;

• There was a way to pinpoint exactly how your student learns, their strengths and their challenges
• There was a way to remove confusion over finding the best help for the learner
• There was a way for teachers and parents to ‘step into the child’s shoes’, really understand how they ‘tick’ and how to help them to improve in areas they are finding difficult
• The learner could understand their challenges and learn how to learn in a way that works for them so that they begin to believe in themselves

It is possible! The Cognitive Abilities Profile is a framework set up to do just that.

Introducing the CAP

The Cognitive Abilities Profile (CAP) developed by Dr Ruth Deutsch, is a framework to help teachers, parents and the learner to;

• Recognise the learner’s strengths and challenges
• Plan together how best to intervene to help the learner progress
• Systematically monitor development

Background:

CAP is a research based, psychological consultation tool that is robust, reliable and valid. It draws on developmental psychology concepts such as Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development and Luria’s model of mental processes, as well as the Dynamic Assessment field of Feuerstein and Lidz which focuses on developing potential and future learning.

 It is possibly the first time that Dynamic Assessment (DA) concepts, usually delivered through lengthy, time-consuming direct testing, have been incorporated into a consultation-based, solution-focused framework. The CAP offers the benefits of the DA approach without having to actually do the DA testing.

This consultation/observation framework helps parents, teachers, therapists and anyone working with the student in question, to finetune their evaluation of the student’s approach to their learning. It shines a spotlight onto the elements of regular classroom learning and other activities, and how the school child finds them, without necessarily needing a lengthy individual assessment. It aims to remove the confusion around what is hampering the learner’s overall social, emotional and academic development, and how best to help them.

What the CAP can tell you:

• The conditions needed for successful learning to occur
• The amount and type of support needed by the student
• A profile of the learner’s thinking skills
• Information about learning processes
• How to highlight the school child’s cognitive skills in order to develop appropriate cognitive IEP’s
• Interventions and how to prioritise ‘what makes the difference’
• Reduce confusion over finding appropriate interventions
• Systematic monitoring of progress

Who is the CAP suitable for?

The CAP is not an age-normed psychometric assessment and is therefore appropriate to be used for learners of any age, both prior to school ages and well beyond. It can be used as a valid assessment of functioning across a full range of situations – both in and out of conventional learning settings.

The CAP is a flexible tool and can be used on its own or alongside other evidence from tests and reports or other forms of assessment. It is not designed to be used as a stand-alone clinical diagnostic tool but can contribute to evidence leading to clinical diagnoses.

The CAPs goal is to clarify the learner’s current learning abilities and experience. It removes confusion for parents, teachers and the learner themselves, as they all become aware of the learner’s cognitive profile – their strengths, challenges and how they meet their environment both in the classroom and beyond. The CAP then shines light onto the most appropriate interventions to support the learner’s development, based on their current baseline and systematically monitors their progress.

The CAP framework process

The CAP assessment evaluates:

• the learner’s cognitive abilities
• the learner’s response to different teaching strategies 
• the skills needed for the learning subjects and tasks that the learner is involved with

All three directly influence each other. The student, the teacher and the subject/task, together make up the sum-total of the learning partnership and experience. 

How it works

The CAP uses a structured consultation to enable assessment and scoring of the learner’s functioning by agreement of the key people working with the child/young person. Across each of the domains of learning, considerations are made over whether the learner can learn independently, sometimes independently, only with support, or not able, even with support.   

This leads to a detailed profile of the learner’s cognitive abilities as well as their current overall functioning, and the most appropriate interventions that could further their development.

The three sections making up the CAP evaluation:

Section A: The Learner

 Collaborative discussion and evaluation of the learner’s cognitive abilities in the seven key domains of functioning: Attention, Perception, Memory, Language/Communication, Reasoning/Logic, Metacognition (Strategic thinking), and Emotions and Behaviours affecting learning. Each of the domains are building blocks of learning which interlink with each other. When there are challenges in one or more of these domains, the learner struggles to learn. When they are helped with their weak domains of learning, they often make global progress.

This section of the CAP evaluation allows for a detailed learner’s profile to emerge. We can then begin to understand how the student is learning and quickly, easily identify where a struggle begins. For example, a child struggling to regulate his attention, won’t be able to take in (perceive) what he is learning properly and then won’t be able to remember it. A student who has language difficulties will struggle to build on what he learns, find meaning in it, and develop his thinking further.

 Behaviours affecting learning are explored in depth. These are symptomatic of how the learner views him/herself.  A student who has been struggling with learning will often find new learning a painful and distressing experience. They could struggle to be motivated, scared of their feelings of failure, ashamed and confused, believing they are different from their peers, blaming themselves for not managing and sometimes even cause large classroom disruptions in order to cope with their feelings.

Section B: The Learner’s response to teaching

Discussion and collaboration with parents, classroom teachers, mentors and others involved with the student, rating what they perceive the learner’s response to be to various teaching and learning strategies.

This helps to develop insights into possible reasons for the learner’s success and difficulties, what his/her preferred learning style is, what works best for them as well as giving reasoning for the most suitable strategies for success for this learner.

Section C: The Learning Material

A structured and systematic framework used to investigate the skills that would be necessary for performing requisite tasks both inside and outside of the classroom.

The CAP looks at:

• Content material of the task
• Complexity of the task: how many parts is this work made up of?
• Familiarity: how familiar it is to the student?
• Modality: what modality it is presented in and what modality does the student have to respond in. For example, a maths problem could be presented as a short story which the learner may be required to use to create a graph or chart or display in formulae form
• Level of Abstraction of the task
• Efficiency needed in the task. How necessary is speed and accuracy?
• Cognitive skills needed for the task

This analysis can be used to take note of tasks that the student can succeed in and notice what may present as a challenge for them. We can then make informed differentiation to learning tasks specifically catering to the student’s cognitive abilities profile.

A combination of the information gathered from all the three evaluations creates the learner’s baseline CAP, which is used to collaborate on the first set of cognitive targets to be worked on with the learner, across the board – both in and out of the classroom.

Baseline CAP results are just the starting point:

Monitoring progress:

Unlike other standardised testing, which are summative results of the students learning so far – used to show ‘yesterday’s learning’, the CAP assessment is about ‘tomorrow’s learning’, considering what the most appropriate ways are to help the learner progress.

S.M.A.R.T (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Timely) targets are used as goals for intervention, and they are systematically re-rated with time as the learner progresses, leading to new targets and goals.

Cognitive IEPS are developed based on the student’s current profile and are reviewed termly, often in tandem with curricular based IEPS. The student’s progress is systematically tracked, allowing for a collaborative reflection on their current progress and where to set further targets.

Ensuring that all students can learn

From an early age, children learn about themselves and their interactions with their environment through the feedback they receive from those around them. They very quickly pick up on which things they are judged to be ‘good’ at, and in which areas they are found wanting. All too often, this judgement, made by others, becomes a child’s reality, and they come to see themselves the same way that they believe others perceive them – that they are stuck with particular struggles (‘I’m rubbish at maths’) from which they can never escape.

However, when students experience their mind as being more like a muscle, which they have the capacity to develop and improve, they can begin to challenge these beliefs as they experience themselves making progress. They learn to self-determine, rather than be limited by the expectations of others, and self-identify what they can do to responsibly develop, both academically and socially.

Following a highly individualised approach to problem-solving and building intrinsic motivation, we can enable each child to find their unique ‘key’ to become successful in school, with their friends and, as they grow, in their adult life.

Learners who were struggling to learn develop self-awareness of their thinking processes and patterns, what is working for them, what is not, and what needs to be developed so that they can become effective learners. With this in place, huge improvements can occur across the full gamut of academic learning, executive functioning, social behaviours and classroom management.

As students develop their self-competence in learning and bridge this back into their academic work, they become solid independent learners, confident about their thinking skills. This in turn produces a motivated learning environment. Success breeds success.