ABSTRACT
If we are seriously to investigate the possibilities of intervention in cognitive development as an educational strategy it will be necessary to characterise in some detail the nature of what it is that develops, how that development may be monitored, and how enhancement of the development could be recognised. What the workers mentioned in the last chapter lacked was a quantitative model of their target populations. Part of Feuerstein’s model was that of psychometric mental abilities so, implicitly, his model of the population was hidden in the norm-referenced tables of the tests such as Thurstone’s Primary Mental Abilities (PMA). Strange as it may seem, by the early 1970s the only worker we have been able to find who looked at the standardisation tables of a major psychometric test – in this case the Stanford-Binet – and asked what model they portrayed of the whole child population was a mammalian brain researcher, Herman Epstein, who was looking for evidence of age-related growth and plateaux phases related to brain-growth evidence. In the Piagetian field we have Piaget as late as 1972 asserting that all people go through the formal operations stage but that maybe some adults only use it in the field of their work life. This notion dies very hard with many people for many reasons.
