Cognitive Skills — but what does this mean?
Perception & Thinking & Learning, oh my!
A Formal Definition
Cognitive: the process of obtaining knowledge through thought, experience, and the senses. From Latin “to consider” — it means to think deeply on… knowing or apprehending by the understanding of something.
We use cognitive skills whenever we try to understand anything. This is how it works:
- You are taught something — some new info
- You think about it
- You talk about it in your own words
- You notice how this new info fits into other things that you know
Cognitive Skills
Cognitive skills are what separate the good learners from the so-so learners. Here’s why:
- Without developed cognitive skills, children fall behind because they aren’t able to integrate new information as they are taught it.
- The sad truth is that most students move on to the next grade before they have mastered the basic academic skills like reading, writing and math… because they haven’t developed cognitive skills.
Remember: The ability to learn and make sense of new information is crucial to successful learning… and that’s why developing cognitive skills is so important. That’s what we do.
