Consider PREP (PASS Reading Enhancement Program), its roots and assumptions. First of all, PREP assumes that children’s difficulties in learning can be modified, reduced, and improved through appropriate cognitive stimulation, that is, the child has an enormous potential for learning, only some of which is exploited in regular classroom instruction. It also assumes that if the child is appropriately treated from the beginning, these unused potentials can be developed and the possibility of a learning deficit can be avoided.
The inspiration for modifying the child’s cognitive functions comes from studies on early stimulation, first done on animals and later on young children. It was shown by Donald Hebb and his colleagues in Canada (Das, 1973) that even rats can improve in learning to get around mazes and solving problems if they are reared in an environment that provides a number of recreational activities, such as swings and slides, and problems to be solved in an indoor living setting.
In contrast, rats that are brought up in a deprived environment, within the four walls of a little cage, do not seem to be able to learn quickly. This led to the idea of early stimulation of potentially disadvantaged children. In spite of the many controversies surrounding its effectiveness, the belief that human beings are plastic and that intelligence is malleable encouraged the early Headstart programs. (Headstart is a program of the United States Department of Health and Human Services, that provides comprehensive education, health, nutrition, and parent involvement services to low-income children and their families.)
Let us understand one thing clearly: providing a culturally rich environment for children who are otherwise disadvantaged by poverty and unfavorable family circumstances is the right thing to do. It does not matter if early education programs do not result in improvement of intelligence on standardized IQ tests (Das, 1973; Haywood and Tapp, 1966).
Another line of thinking that has influenced the construction of remedial programs is based on how we have been able to train individuals with mental retardation to increase their memory. One form of training involved teaching strategies to remember a series of numbers or simple words. The strategies included listening carefully to each number or word as it was spoken, mentally rehearsing the words or numbers, and then trying to recall the series.
This strategy training was quite successful in increasing the span of memory for individuals with mental retardation. However, there was a problem. Those who were trained to use this strategy could not easily and automatically transfer what they had learned from their previous experience to a new task. It would be unrealistic to train them every time they were given a new task. Nevertheless, the experience did show that even moderately mentally handicapped individuals can learn to use strategies for a specific task.
Strategy training was not perhaps the best way to teach these indi-viduals to increase their mental capacity or sharpen their cognitive functions. Direct teaching of strategies requires the learner to both remember and apply the rules when faced with a new situation, and also to determine whether the situation calls for the application of the rules. For example, if the words are related to each other, it may not be necessary to remember them one by one.
Rather, remembering the cluster of words that are related would be a more economic strategy. This is what the individuals with mental retardation needed to under-stand but could not. Such flexibility in using a strategy may come easily to children with normal intelligence and to most learning-disabled children, but not to those with mental retardation.
Therefore, a different way of learning has to be encouraged, one that is inductive, as opposed to the learning described earlier which is deductive. In the new kind of learning that we are proposing, the child goes through a specific task that requires the use of certain strategies but is never directly told what the strategies are. The child discovers them, guided by the structure of the task. As the child performs more of these tasks, strategies develop almost unconsciously, that is, the child begins to understand the principles that must be used to solve the task.
For example, in a task that involves sequencing (remembering a series of digits or words in sequence), the child must learn to rehearse, but when the list is too long for memorizing at one stretch, the child must learn how to “chunk” or cluster the words. For instance, if the words are cat, man, tea, wall, hot, shoe, and girl, the child may learn to chunk them into groups of three, thereby remembering the whole series easily. In this way, children develop their own ways of dealing with such a task. In this inductive type of learning, rules are not given by the teacher, who does not know which way would be the best for a particular child, but discovered and used, sometimes unconsciously, by the learner.