The experience of using a Cognitive Acceleration approach with

prospective primary teachers from three Chilean universities.

Background Information and relevance of the study

In modern society, knowledge exchange plays a major role, and the globalised era
has posed new challenges for current educational systems. Consequently, the educational
goals pursued some decades ago need to be changed to accommodate both new and
future ways of improving the schooling process of future generations. A group of scholars
(Torff, 2003; Barak & Dori, 2009; Preiss & Sternberg, 2006) has agreed that one of these
new educational aims is the development of thinking skills that allow students to find,
manage, select, criticise and update their information. For this reason, teachers need to
change their focus from teaching the content of subjects to the promotion of complex
cognitive skills that encourage students to become independent and active learners.
Since Piaget and Inhelder (1958) developed their cognitive model, it has been
traditionally understood that types of thinking that are more complex are usually acquired
during adolescence (Anderson, 2003). According to Piaget and Inhelder (1958), more
complex types of thinking are primarily characterised by the presence of logical and
hypothetical deductive reasoning. In other words, children are no longer able to think only
about their real and concrete experiences, but can also consider that which is possible. In
this context, children are now capable of drawing conclusions from hypothetical
information and not only from facts.
However, the body of research on cognitive development conducted over the last
three decades has shown that a significant proportion of secondary school students
(Shemesh et al., 1992; Adey & Shayer, 1994; Valanides, 1996, 1997a, 1997b) and
university students (Niaz, 1985; Reyes, 1987) has not yet developed these abilities. In this
context, Shayer and Adey (1981) decided to design a cognitive acceleration (CA)
programme for school students that could reverse this situation. Therefore, they created a
set of thinking activities that were used once a fortnight instead of ordinary science
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lessons in order to promote and enhance the students general thinking abilities, which
could then be transferred to other tasks, situations or domains. The underlying
assumption of the approach was that there is a general thinking processor that natural
development can accelerate through specific intervention (Adey, 1999).
Throughout the 1980s, Michael Shayer and Philip Adey investigated how well their
CA programme worked in a number of schools in England, using a quasi-experimental
approach. The intervention was considered successful because the students assigned to
the experimental condition showed statistically greater cognitive development after the
programme than did their control counterparts. In addition, the authors found that the
intervention also had a long-term and far-transfer effect. Although the intervention was
set in a science context and was conducted by science teachers, students assigned to the
experimental condition obtained better results not only in science but also in national
mathematics and English tests. Since CA produced such promising results in science, CA
programmes began to be developed for other school subjects (Adhami et al., 1998; Shayer
& Adhami, 2003; Adhami et al., 2005), and according to students ages (Adey et al., 2001a,
Adey et al., 2002; Shayer & Adhami, 2003; Adhami et al., 2005) and countries (Iqbal &
Shayer, 2000; Mbano, 2003; Endler & Bond, 2008).
Although CA programmes can be considered as a potential solution for the poor
development of thinking skills in many schools today, the problem is complex and other
factors inhibit or constrain the uptake of CA programmes in schools. One of these is that
prospective teachers may not have yet developed these thinking skills (Silverman &
Creswell, 1982; Wyatt, 1983; Brownell et al., 1993) and thus may feel uncomfortable or
threatened when trying to work with activities that they themselves found challenging.
Thinking skills have also not had a strong presence in most schools or subject curricula, as
the emphasis has been on content knowledge rather than on skills. This has led to most
teachers that are already working in school classrooms having a very limited idea about
the meaning of thinking skills and such skills could be promoted in the classroom, with just
a small group of them claiming that promoting thinking is an important objective of
teaching (Barak & Shakhman, 2008).
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This is not surprising because, although there is some agreement regarding the
relevance of developing these skills in both teachers and students, thinking skills are not
being sufficiently emphasised in teachers preparation courses (Barak & Dori, 2009).
Therefore, if teachers are not promoting or improving their students thinking abilities, it
might be because they do not know how to do so or are unaware of the importance
thereof. For this reason, this study aims to develop a Cognitive Acceleration course within
the context of initial teacher training in order to explore the learning experiences of
prospective primary teachers during the course.

Research questions and Objectives

My study looks at the development and trial of a thinking skills course for preservice primary teachers. The main research question that this study addresses is:
How do prospective teachers perceive a cognitive acceleration approach in relation to
teaching and learning?
This main research question could be divided into the following specific research
questions:
1. How do the formal reasoning skills of prospective teachers change after
experiencing a course on cognitive acceleration activities?
2. How do the views of prospective teachers towards teaching and learning change
following a cognitive acceleration intervention programme?
3. How do the attitudes of prospective teachers towards the teaching of mathematics
develop following an intervention that uses a cognitive acceleration approach?
4. How do the attitudes of prospective teachers towards developing thinking change
following an intervention that uses a cognitive acceleration approach?

Research objectives
In order to explore those research questions and to structure my study, there were six
main research aims:

(i) Firstly, I adapted the Cognitive Acceleration in Maths (CAME) programme for working
with prospective primary teachers in Chile. The CAME activities were originally designed
to be used with school students in the UK. Therefore, they not only had to be translated
into Spanish, but also needed to be adapted for working with older students in a
completely different context. One of the major features of each CAME activity is that it
mainly engages students by introducing a story or an imaginary context that presents the
activity as a real problem and not simply as a mathematical one. This hook cannot be
lost and, for that reason, I changed some aspects of each activity in order to present them
as real problems that students might face in their future careers as teachers.
(ii) The second objective was to explore any changes in the prospective teachers formal
reasoning skills. Cognitive acceleration programmes are generally described as
interventions that affect the students general thinking ability.
(iii) The third objective was to explore how prospective teachers view a cognitive
acceleration approach in terms of experiencing the activities as learners. This aim looked
at the experience that prospective teachers had as learners during the CAME course.
(iv) The fourth objective was to explore how prospective teachers viewed a cognitive
acceleration approach in terms of the application of the activities to the teaching and
learning of mathematics. In contrast to the previous objective, this one examined their
experience of the course in relation to their training as teachers, in the sense of
attempting to discover how plausible and useful they think the approach is for their future
classrooms and students.
(v) The fifth objective was to explore how prospective teachers view a cognitive
acceleration approach in terms of their confidence in teaching mathematics. This aim
attempted to discover if prospective teachers felt there was any change in their ability to
teach mathematics after participating in the course.
(vi) Finally, the study explored how prospective teachers views regarding the importance
of developing thinking changed following a cognitive acceleration course. This aim is
related to the previous one, in the sense that I attempted to investigate whether teachers

recognised any changes in terms of their views on promoting thinking in their classrooms
after participating in the CAME course.

Methodology
In order to explore the different facets of the phenomenon under study, this
research used a mixed methods approach. For this reason, the impact that the CAME
course had on prospective teachers thinking skills was not only measured by using an
instrument (Shayer, 1977) that assessed the participants improvements in thinking skills,
but their learning and teaching experiences were also recorded through qualitative
research tools (learning journals, interviews, and field notes).
In terms of the research design, the study used a quasi-experimental design
because it was impossible to randomly assign the participants to one out of the two
conditions: experimental or control group. The change over time, in terms of the
participants reasoning skills, was assessed by a paper and pencil test at the beginning (pretest) and at the end (post-test) of the CAME course (intervention). Those results were
statistically analysed using analysis of variance (ANOVA).
All the written material, which included interview transcripts, field notes and
learning journals, was analysed using a qualitative content analysis. Hsieh and Shannon
(2005, p.1278) define a qualitative content analysis as a research method for the
subjective interpretation of the content of text data through the systematic classification
process of coding and identifying themes or patterns. They also claimed that content
analysis is a useful research method when the researcher wants to explore or describe a
phenomenon that has a relatively limited theoretical and literature background, as is the
case in this research.
The coding process used in this work cannot be defined as being exclusively
deductive or inductive, since a combination of both approaches was used. However, it is
possible to say that a deductive approach was predominant. Initially, a list of codes was
derived from the literature review and the research questions as a way of guiding the
initial immersion in the text. However, that code list was considered to be preliminary,
5

given that it was theoretically driven and the questions addressed by this research were
novel; therefore, I could not completely rely on previous evidence. For this reason, the
codes from the initial list were treated in the same way as the codes that emerged during
the coding process. In other words, they were continuously revised and adapted in the
light of new evidence.
The data analysis followed the conventional content analysis process suggested by
Hsieh and Shannon (2005). I first read all the transcripts in order to have a complete
picture in mind. I then read every word in detail, with the purpose of creating the first
emerging codes and linking some text passages to the existing (theoretical) ones, by using
qualitative data analysis software (ATLAS.ti, version 5.2). The next step was to re-read
everything but, this time, highlighting my impressions and reflections, as well as taking
note of thoughts and aspects that were relevant to the initial analysis. Subsequently,
based on these initial thoughts, the first labels for the codes emerged and they began to
be structured into a preliminary coding list.
As a result, I started to find relationships between the codes, which meant that
they were organised into broader categories, or group codes. Each code, subcategory and
category was then defined and exemplified. Finally, I tried to develop a structure that
reflected the hierarchy of these categories. It is important to mention that, as stated
previously, this was a continuous cycle in which I continuously revised and refined the
codes until they formed a coherent and trustworthy representation of the raw data.

The sample and the sampling process

The population for my research was prospective primary teachers in Chile who
were in their fourth or fifth (last) year of their Bachelor of Education programmes. The
reason behind restricting the potential population to fourth- or fifth-year students was
that what I wanted to explore was not only the impact of the CA approach on their
reasoning skills and perceptions, but also how they perceived the approach in relation to
teaching and learning mathematics or, in other words, how useful they thought the
approach to be for teaching and learning mathematics. In this sense, it was better for
6

them to have had some internship practice in order to reflect about the approach in
relation to their experience as future teachers, and not only as students.
As the course was going to be delivered during an entire university term which, in
Chile, lasts for five months, I decided to design it as a formal course that could meet the
requirements of the Education Departments in order to propose it to some of them and to
offer it as one of the optional courses that prospective teachers could take during that
term. Had I not done so, it would have been highly unlikely that I would be able to recruit
the participants that I needed and to ask them to come once a week for an entire term. In
addition, the initial idea of using a CA approach for training prospective teachers in Chile
started with my own conviction that it could be a significant contribution to the way in
which teachers are being trained in Chile. For that reason, it was also strategic to involve
Education Departments in the development of the project in order to be able to rely on
their commitment and to maximise the potential impact of the course.
Based on these reasons, the specific sampling method I used was an intentional
cluster sampling (Hesse-Biber, 2010), whereby the smallest eligible unit was Education
Departments and not individual students. This type of method had the advantage of
allowing me to choose universities that could be a good representation of the variety of
higher education institutions that exist in Chile, and to ensure that participating
universities were committed to the project, because all the sessions were going to be
developed in their lecture rooms during term time and they had to provide all the
necessary materials (blackboards, pens, photocopies and so on). Therefore, it was
essential that Education Departments were engaged in the project in order for them to
facilitate such resources.
Even though the sampling process had the aforementioned advantages, it also had
the drawback of generating samples composed of smaller groups (clusters) that, in turn,
were composed of individuals who shared certain characteristics. For example, all the
participants who are studying at the same university are likely to have similar academic
backgrounds, because each university has specific entry requirements. This makes it
difficult to ensure that the sample selected is representative of the population; that is to
7

say, that the individuals included in the sample are a good illustration of the variety
present in the general population (Cohen et al., 2007).
Three Departments of Education participated in this research. For confidentiality
reasons, they will be indicated as follows: (i) UA, (ii) UB and (iii), UC. I decided to include
only three universities for reasons of feasibility. As I had to deliver all the CA lessons and
analyse all the data collected from them, three was a large enough number to ensure
variability within my sample, while still being small enough to be manageable within the
resources and time frame of a small research project.

Main findings and conclusions

The results from the statistical analysis showed that the CAME intervention was
successful, because even when prospective teachers from the two groups (experimental
and control) had a similar performance in terms of their thinking skills at the beginning of
the study, at the end of it the prospective teachers assigned to the experimental condition
showed statistically greater cognitive development than their control counterparts.
In addition, the content analysis of the interviews, field notes, and learning
journals indicated that, at the end of the CAME course, prospective teachers showed
positive attitudinal changes towards teaching and learning in general, and mathematics in
particular. The participants also increased their confidence in their ability to teach
mathematics and to promote thinking skills in their own students. In terms of the CAME
methodology, prospective teachers not only found it very novel and motivating, but also
commented that dealing with the thinking skills topic during a university course was very
unusual and important to their professional development. This study also showed that at
the end of the CAME course prospective teachers felt they developed strategies they
could use in their classrooms in the future.

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