Feuerstein’s New Program for the Facilitation of Cognitive Development in Young Children

Abstract

The authors make the case for the inclusion of cognitive enrichment programs in early mainstream education that should be designed to eliminate the early discrepancies in children’s cognitive abilities and prevent later learning disabilities and achievement gaps. Following a review of the literature on existing early cognitive enrichment programs and their effects with cognitive impaired children and children with special needs, the authors present the theoretical and programmatic features of Feuerstein’s 3-year basic program, along with a brief description of its different modules. The authors also provide a summary of all the available evidence of the program’s effectiveness, including the results of 3 evaluation studies of pilot projects in the United States. The article culminates in an appeal for rigorous research on the feasibility and effects of programs in mainstream education for early cognitive enrichment and prevention of learning problems, including research on the effects of Feuerstein’s Instrumental Enrichment–Basic (FIE-B) program.

Clinical Applications of the Modifiability Model: Feuerstein's Learning Experience and the Instrumental Enrichment Basic Program

“…Results gained by dynamic assessment procedures show that our study is in line with the Alaskan study involving preschool children with regular intelligence (Ben-Hur & Feuerstein, 2011): the conceptual/linguistic, reasoning/logic domains and behaviours affecting learning have been the areas where the most salient changes happened in case of children with intellectual disability after the two years intervention period (in conceptual/linguistic areas 55,4 percentage points, in reasoning/logic 57,4 and in behaviours while learning 56,1 percentage points growth have been experienced) according to Cognitive Abilities Profile (Figure 103).…”

“…Though our population in the study consisted of rather heterogenous children both in age and original levels of functioning, also in the severity of comorbid phenomena, we tried to treat them as a group for further analysis. Average improvement of our participants on normative tests is summarized in Table 15 The most salient changes according to test results are the development of linguistic/conceptual domainsjust in line with the results of the study which has applied FIE-Basic with preschool children with regular intelligence (Ben-Hur & Feuerstein, 2011).…”

“…We have evidence from international research studies that MLE and FIE-Basic have a positive effect on children with regular intelligence or children in the socially disadvantaged population (Ben-Hur & Feuerstein, 2011;Salas et al, 2010, see Chapter 3.6). Is this possible to elicit changes in the development of fluid intelligence of children with moderate and mild intellectual disability as well?…”

“…In the Alaskan study FIE-Basic was given to about 200 preschool and kindergarten children for 1 year in differing intensity (40-60 hours altogether) (Ben-Hur & Feuerstein, 2011). In the absence of control groups the gains were analyzed in terms of the differential performance between age equivalent scores (available from most school readiness measures) and the children's chronological age in months.…”

“…The incongruent, funny episodes help to maintain attention and curiousity. The tasks are pictorial, cartoon-like drawings, reflecting the rich visual world of our era (Ben-Hur & Feuerstein, 2011).…”