What are Cognitive Skills
Any academic activity a child participates in requires efficient and strong underlying skills to complete the task at hand successfully. Often children get frustrated and have difficulty with their classwork is because they lack the required cognitive skills for processing the information properly.
The term Cognitive skill refers to the ability of human beings to process the collected sensory information. This comprises the human ability to evaluate, analyze, recall experiences, retain information, determine action and make comparisons. Although cognitive skills have an inborn section, majority of these skills are learned. However, if the development of these does not happen naturally, the result is cognitive weakness leading to reducing one’s learning capacity.
Like motor and sensory skills even the cognitive skills can be practiced and improved upon under adequate training. Effective training one can strengthen his weak cognitive skills while enhancing the normal cognitive skills for improved learning.
The major cognitive skills essential for learning are:
- Attention skills
- Memory
- Logic and Reasoning
- Auditory Processing
- Visual Processing and
- Processing speed
Attention Skills comprise three parts i.e. sustained attention, selective attention and divided attention. each of these develop the ability in a student to remain focused and on a task for the amount of time one can focus, while having distractions and multi-tasking respectively.
Memory for instance deals with storing and recalling information in two parts i.e. long term and short term memory. Long term memory is crucial for recalling facts for tests, spellings and comprehension. A weak long term memory for students might result in forgetting names, figures, dates etc. thereby performing poor in their unit tests.
Short term or the working memory deals with capturing and holding information immediately whilst performing a mental task. Students suffering from short term memory issues might face issues with following multiple instructions or need information to be repeated often.
Logic and Reasoning deal with one’s ability to reason, solve problems and form concepts. The students who have underdeveloped logic and reasoning skill usually are seen struggling with abstract learning and math word problems.
Auditory Processing is one’s skill to blend, analyze and divide. This skill is extremely vital for reading and spelling and is the must need while a child is learning to read. A weak auditory processing skill will hamper learning to read, comprehend and fluent reading.
Visual Processing is the skill to observe, analyze and think visually. This is the skill to create a visual picture in one’s mind of the concepts and words being taught in the class. It is found that students who have problems with their visual processing face issues in reading maps, comprehending and word problems.
Processing Speed lastly is the skill to perform ether simple or complex tasks speedily. This skill helps in developing the ability of the brain to work fast and accurately ignoring all the distractions. If a student is weak in processing speed, he would take time in doing his homework or the last one to wear his shoes.
Cognitive skills might sound a not-so important factor in just reading but it does play a major part in the development of a child. Studies say that children should be inculcated in with cognitive skills from the preschool level itself to help them give a strong foundation.
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