PROFESSOR FEUERSTEIN AND COGNITIVE EDUCATION

Professor Feuerstein is an Israeli psychologist and a pioneer of cognitive education. He took his PHD at the Sorbonne and studied under Piaget in Geneva. The main tenet of Professor Feuerstein's theory is that all children, regardless of the cause, nature or severity of their disability, are capable of learning far more than is usually assumed. This has been borne out not only by the personal experiences of countless young people who have benefited from his methods, but by many published studies.

His work began in the 1940's with severely traumatized child survivors of the holocaust, who were thought to be beyond therapy of any sort. When he began working with children with learning disabilities, he drew on this work to develop an overall programme which he calls "Structural Cognitive Modifiability". This includes four major elements: an interactive or dynamic approach to assessing people's learning propensity (The Learning Propensity Assessment Device or, simply, the LPAD); a programme of cognitive learning called Instrumental Enrichment (IE); a set of closely defined Cognitive Functions which are the focus of his assessment and development programmes; and finally, a distinctive approach to Mediation called "Mediated Learning Experience (MLE) which 'drives' the LPAD and IE processes.

His cognitive education programme is a recognized method of intervention, which has been translated into 20 languages and used in 70 countries world wide. For example, it has been incorporated into education programmes in Holland, Spain, France, South America, India, North Africa, the USA and Canada.