COGENT is a cognitive and reading stimulation program. The program should benefit cognitive development, typically of developing children as well as children with special needs, such as those with limited exposure to literacy, mild developmental delay, language impairment, and children at risk for developing dyslexia and other learning difficulties. The program has been effective in skill-building, in preparation for reading in a clinical tutoring situation, as well as for small-group instruction. COGENT holds a great deal of promise as a remediation program for small classrooms.
COGENT is designed to provide alternative routes toward the development of reading and academic skills. The program is based on broad developmental theories, extremely important to cognitive and language development, while using basic cognitive processes described in PASS. It is intended for children aged four to seven, preschoolers to children in early school years, who need to be prepared for reading. However, some teachers are experimenting with it for even older children who appear to be resistant to acquiring prerequisite skills for reading. COGENT may prepare children for receiving PREP in case they still require reading intervention.
There are five modules that make up the COGENT program, as mentioned previously.
1. Squeeze and Say
2. Clap and Listen
3. Funny Relatives
4. Name Game
5. Shapes, Colors, and Letters
A Student Activity Completion Checklist (SACC) is provided at the end of each module so that the student’s progress may be tracked.
MODULE 1: Squeeze and Say
Attention is a problem with many preschool children, children with developmental delays or those from disadvantaged backgrounds. Another difficulty is learning to control and regulate one’s own behavior using internal speech. During the development of this ability some children will have an external dialogue with themselves, for others the dialogue is internal, and for some children it may not be spoken even silently. To explain further, internal dialogue uses internal speech.
The complete process of internalization may begin with silent speech, but some children may skip this stage. Internal speech, which is the child’s own private way of speaking to him/ herself, replaces external speech when children have gone further in their cognitive development. In normally developing children, this occurs around the age of five. For children with developmental delays or disadvantaged backgrounds, it may take longer.
The major challenge for many children is that their attention has to be mobilized and focused on relevant stimuli; they cannot afford to be distracted. If we can guide children to attend to the linguistic features of stimuli, along with training their attention, then we are achieving two things at the same time—improving their attention and enhancing their processing of language. Both of these skills are exemplified in Module 1.
The student’s task is to either squeeze or not squeeze their hand in response to a series of pictures and directions presented by the facilitator. Pictures of animals and flowers are presented one at a time, in a variety of sequences. The student must squeeze his/her hand in response to an increasingly complex set of rules.
Levels of difficulty
Preliminary Tasks: Activities are provided so that students leam to discriminate and control their responses. First, students focus on increasing the speed at which they name common objects. Second, students learn to control their motor responses to visually presented stimuli (pictures of flowers and animals).
Difficulty Level 1: Consists of two parts; the first requiring only a motor response while the second a verbal and motor response.
Difficulty Level 2: Requires both a verbal and motor response while increasing the speed of responding.
Difficulty Level 3: Requires discriminating and processing an increased number of stimuli prior to responding.
MODULE 2: Clap and Listen
Children first learn words by listening to them. Auditory discrimination, that is, children’s ability to tell two words apart when they sound almost the same (for example, kate, gate), requires the ability to discriminate sounds, also known as phonemes, and is learnt through day-to-day experience. However, some children may need planned experiences to develop auditory discrimination skills. In training children to do this, Module 2 activities draw children’s attention to specific sounds in words and syllables. This is also referred to as phonological awareness, as children must attend to the sound structure of words in order to read. Attention to sounds in a word is enhanced when students are asked to say the word aloud.
Memory of sounds in a word or memory of words just spoken in conversation is as useful as discriminating words and sounds in words. In fact, children use many strategies for remembering words in conversation. For example, when listening to a sequence like “After you pick up the toys, I want you to put the big ones in the basket and small ones in the closet”, some children may rememf er the sequence by repeating it under their breath, while other children may visualize the chain of actions.
Rehearsal or repetition of words under one’s breath requires that one first says the words to oneself, that is, to covertly pronounce them. The faster you can do this, the more words you can remember. Fast visualization, likewise, helps in keeping a series of objects or actions alive in working memory. Some of the items in Module 2 provide occasions for children to develop their own strategy to remember sequences of words and phonemes.
Phonological awareness and working memory are absolutely necessary for preparing children to begin reading; Module 2 includes training in both.
The student’s task is to respond to, or say, a series of words or sounds. Students listen to a series of words and when they hear a word that is different from the rest of the sequence, they clap their hands.
The level of difficulty is increased by (a) making the word series longer, (b) presenting the series at a faster rate, (c) discriminating sounds, and (d) holding information in working memory while simultaneously processing the information.
Levels of difficulty
Preliminary Level: Picture and word stimuli are used to orient students to the module tasks prior to the remaining tasks, which are primarily presented orally.
Difficulty Level 1: Requires a motor response to hearing a different word in a series spoken by the facilitator.
Difficulty Level 2: Requires a motor response to hearing a different sound in a series spoken by the facilitator. Speed of responding is also increased.
Difficulty Level 3: Requires motor and verbal responses while processing and holding an increasing number of stimuli in working memory.
MODULE 3: Funny Relatives
The syntax of sentences such as The child is playing with the ball or The dog is chasing the cat describes actions and emphasizes a serial organization of behavior. These types of sentences are referred to as syntagmatic structures by Luria (1981), and are understood and used by children before complex language structures. Later, children begin to understand and use sentences that convey relationships and involve the mastery of complex, hierarchically structured aspects of language (for example, Both the sun and moon are bright or The earth is round like a ball).
Luria describes these types of structures as paradigmatic. Understanding and using syntagmatic and paradigmatic structures enables children to comprehend the speech of others and to compose and write their thoughts as they go through higher grades in elementary school. For example, understanding the meaning of the sentences in an arithmetic problem is very often a matter of understanding paradigmatic relationships. Consider sentences like “Which of the two lines is shorter?” or “If this flowerpot has four flowers and the other has six, then how many flowers do the two pots have altogether?”
Module 3 focuses on comprehending sentence structure. Comprehension depends on several important aspects and therefore, should be encouraged. (All of these have been included to a certain extent for training in Module 3.)
• Analyzing words phonologically.
• Enhancing working-memory capacity.
• Inferring what is going to happen next and why, while listening to a conversation or a story.
• Actively searching for meaning—what is the general idea that’s being expressed and how well is it getting across?
• Building vocabulary.
• Enhancing general knowledge of the subject matter, of the conversation, or narrative support, and increasing “knowledge of the world”.
The student’s task is to indicate the relationships described by the facilitator.
Levels of difficulty
Difficulty Level 1: Involves students placing objects in relation to each other, in response to verbal prompts provided by the facilitator.
Difficulty Level 2: Student places animals in an arrangement prompted by the verbalizations of the facilitator and verbalizes the spatial relationship. The student also responds to simple questions about the arrangement.
Difficulty Level 3: Consists of several tasks: (a) comprehension of short stories and construction of creative narratives, (b) understanding of adjectives, prepositions, and temporal relationships, and (c) increasing verbal working memory by remembering and applying inclusion and exclusion rules when naming objects, letters, and words.
MODULE 4: Name Game
The sound structure of words guides children’s reading and spelling ability. Words are spelled as a whole or alternatively as a string of letters that require sounding out. New spellings are often learnt by analogy. For example, adding ed to perform spells performed. Add ed to skid and what do you get? A new spelling can also be learnt when the child knows the meaning of the word. For example, a child could tell the spelling of the word ground by connecting it with grind or with the solid ground on which you stand. Human connects with man, so a child who understands man will find it easier to spell human.
In spelling and writing, the successive position of letters has to be remembered, especially when the word is a long one. This requires use of working memory, that is, the child’s ability to carry things in the head until the task is completed, in this case spelling a word. Sometimes, a child may be able to spell a word aloud but may make mistakes in putting it down on paper. Writing, then, requires a double dose of successive processing. This module focuses on successive processing abilities and revisits phonological awareness training, with onset/rhyme discrimination and sound blending/deletion tasks, which prepare children for spelling.
Levels of difficulty
Difficulty Level 1: Requires a motor or verbal response to hearing beginning sounds in words.
Difficulty Level 2: Requires (a) a motor and verbal response to hearing segments of words that are divided into onsets and rhymes, and (b) sound blending and deletion of compound words.
Difficulty Level 3: At this level students (a) say and read words, dividing them into onsets and rhymes, (Jo) say words using sound blending and deletion rules with one and two syllable words, and (c) apply inclusion and exclusion rules when naming words.
MODULE 5: Shapes, Colors, and Letters
Children generally learn to read words in the first year of school, although many children know the letters of the alphabet in kindergarten. Letters have to be recognized quickly in order to read words quickly. Those children who have mastered alphabet recognition well before they begin reading in Grade 1 have a vast advantage over those who have not. In fact, they turn out to be better readers even in Grades 3 and 4. In contrast, poor readers in those grades start off with a handicap; they are slow in recognizing letters of the alphabet. There are many reasons why some children are slow, and the absence of an environment of literacy at home, before they start school, is a major one.
Can we help children recognize letters quickly so that it becomes an automatic skill? To a great extent we can. The ability to rapidly name letters is the foundational skill that is linked to learning the sounds of words and translating spelling to speech, a skill that children must learn beyond kindergarten.
We also know that naming shapes, objects, and colors is linked to naming letters and words—children who are terribly slow in naming the former are likely to be slow in learning to rapidly name letters and words. Given that, we should include them in training programs for young children, especially those children who might be missing out on learning such skills at home and do not have much of an environment of literacy. Additionally, older children with developmental delays, dyslexia, or general reading difficulties would also benefit from such training.
Levels of difficulty
Preliminary Level: Focus the student’s awareness on semantic features that will be used in later activities to improve speed, automaticity, and working memory capacity.
Difficulty Level 1: Focus on students identifying or naming a single feature (for example, color, shape, single letter).
Difficulty Level 2: Focus on increasing the speed and number of items that the students name, these items being still within a single feature (for example, color or shape).
Difficulty Level 3: Focus on increasing the speed and number of items, and get students to name items consisting of two features (for example, color and shape).