Although kindergarten curricula typically center on the teaching of “basic skills,” cognitive education programs that pursue the same goal have not been entirely successful at fostering reading, writing, and numbers skills. Previous research in our laboratory reinforced our confidence in the ability of cognitive early education to promote educability, especially in children of low socio-economic status. As a preventive measure, we gave the “Bright Start” program of cognitive early education to a group of children from a very low SES group during the kindergarten year, and assessed its effects on acquisition of reading competence through the first three grades, in comparison to a control group from the same social milieu and a control group of much more socially advantaged children. The results affirm once again the influence of the socio-economic environment on learning, and provide evidence that cognitive early education can promote reading acquisition and can compensate in very large measure for socio-economic differences.

Here, we present to Journal of Cognitive Education and Psychology readers the first in a series of “Classical Articles.” The purpose of this series is to reprint some of the articles that have played pivotal role in the development of the field of dynamic assessment and cognitive education. Some of these articles never appeared in English, and others were published in already defunct journals or proceedings. It seems important to make the current generation of researchers familiar with these texts so that our theoretical discussions can be carried out with full awareness of what has been done before us and how the classics of our field articulated their ideas.

Proponents of recent educational approaches to cognitive strategy training have emphasized the importance of ensuring that strategy training is incorporated within the teaching program of the classroom rather than being taught in academic and locational isolation. Designers of the Process-Based Instruction (PBI) model stress such an approach. Staff members in a primary school were trained to use PBI and provided consultancy support while they implemented the approach within their regular classroom academic programs. Students in the experimental school demonstrated significant gains in academic tasks, perceptions of ability, and some planning tasks when compared with the performance of participants in the contrast condition school. Limitations in the approach as well as future research issues are discussed.

A study was conducted in the southern areas of the former Transkei evaluating the development of thinking skills through Feuerstein’s Instrumental Enrichment (FIE) program (Sonn, 1996). The researcher came to certain conclusions and made several recommendations. One of these recommendations was to change the classroom setting to facilitate the effective development of thinking skills. This paper is divided into three parts. Part one discusses the need for an alternative classroom setting. Curriculum developers seldom address the type of environment in which a curriculum should be implemented, even though the environment is a factor that affects the implementation of any curriculum. Therefore, if we want to change the curriculum to allow for the teaching of thinking skills, we have to change the classroom setting as well. Part two is a review of various examples of classroom settings and the alternative instructional structures. Specifically discussed are the advantages of: (a) biology laboratories, (b) longer blocks of time offered several times a week, (3) developing junior science laboratories, historical societies, social policy institutes, publishing houses, television stations, and (d) junior think tanks where groups of interested students, under adult guidance from either a teacher or a professional policy analyst, focus on a problem of concern to the adolescent and adult community. The third part of the paper addresses the question of why alternative instructional settings and structures have not taken root and flourished.