Based on the FEBRUARY 29, 2012, Webinar of the NORTH AMERICAN FEUERSTEIN ALLIANCE
Presenter: Meir Ben-Hur

The subject of the webinar focused on the applications of the Cognitive Map in comparing and relating the FIE Standard and Basic instruments. Following this discussion, future webinars will examine the categorization of the FIE instruments and their relationship to each other, according to features of the Map. The Map provides vital criteria for comparing separate instruments as well as for comparing units within individual instruments. The February 29 webinar, then, was the first of a series of three webinars, focusing on defining these criteria which comprise the Cognitive Map. The seven criteria and their meanings are as follows:

Content: While the relationships among the instruments and the relationships between the instruments and the academic areas in terms of content are not the main target of FIE, identifying the content relationships provides a kind of bridge for students to realize that the thinking processes used in completing the FIE Pages are consistent with the thinking processes that are relevant in different academic areas like math, the sciences, social studies, and language arts. This criterion is perhaps the easiest for teachers to consider.

Modality: This criterion refers to the means by which information is communicated and processed. Modalities include pictorial, verbal, symbolic, numerical, and geometric. One may categorize instruments according to their modalities and also categorize the students’ experiences within the instruments.

Phases: Most specifically, “phases” references the relationship of FIE and non-FIE experiences in terms of the cognitive functions challenged by tasks in the three phases: Input, Elaboration, and Output. This categorization is probably the most important and will be addressed in the third webinar in the series.

Operations: These are the mental processes used in FIE instruments and the rules governing them. Examples include making analogies, as in some of the tasks of Family Relations, Numerical Progressions, and Syllogisms; categorizing, as in the Categorization instrument and Representational Stencil Design; visualizing and representing, as in Organization of Dots, Spatial Orientation I, II, Representational Stencil Design; etc.

Level of Complexity: This refers to a “quantitative” measure of problem-solving challenges, like the number of variables that the learner must work with or the number of step in the process of solving a given task. We can categorize tasks in terms of simple, intermediary level of complexity, and complex. In FIE, the challenge of task complexity is not always presented to the students in a linear way (from simple to complex) as we move from earlier to later instruments. For example, the complexity in the Analytic Perception tasks is not higher than in Organization of Dots. Sometimes the levels of complexity vary, up and down, even within instruments. For example, the tasks in Comparisons Page 12 are much more complex than in the last task, Page 16.

Level of Abstraction: Feuerstein defines abstraction as a measure of distance between the information the thinker has access to and the reality it may represent. A symbol is more abstract than a word, a word is more abstract than a picture, and a picture is more abstract than an object that can be physically manipulated. It may be considered as a “qualitative” measure of cognitive challenges. Levels of abstraction may be categorized in terms such as concrete, intermediary (verbal), or abstract (symbolic). The teacher should alert students to the challenges presented by changes in the level of abstraction within a given instrument (like in Orientation in Space) and across instruments (like Organization of Dots vs. Categorization, or Temporal Relations, etc.). Again, the challenges in terms of levels of abstraction are not presented progressively among the FIE instruments. The instruments Transitive Relations and Syllogisms are both highly abstract, but the last instrument, Representational Stencil Design, is not.

Level of Efficiency: Feuerstein defines this in terms of precision, time, and effort needed by the child in arriving at a problem solution. We may simply classify tasks in terms of the level of efficiency they require (low, intermediary, and high). This criterion is dependent on the other parameters of the cognitive map when we apply them to categorizing tasks. We may look at the variance in the levels of efficiency required by the tasks in Organization of Dots in Page 1 in contrast with the level of efficiency of the tasks in Page 13. The increasing levels of efficiency as determined by the tasks also change across instruments, but not necessarily in an ascending order. Almost always, there is a drop in the challenge of efficiency when we move from a last page of a complex instrument to the first page of a new instrument.

Gratitude is expressed to Meir Ben-Hur for a lucid and thorough presentation.