Cognitive Abilities and Instructional Treatments in a Reasoning Unit for Senior Primary School: A Study of Aptitude Treatment Interaction

Abstract

The research was concerned with the general proposition that if instructional treatments are specifically tailored to suit students grouped according to individual aptitude patterns, learning performances will be improved. The Luria model, providing the theoretical underpinning for the measurement of individual differences in cognitive abilities, proposes that two information processing aptitudes underlie learning, namely simultaneous analysis / synthesis and successive analysis / synthesis. Studies were conducted using female subjects in Year 6 at schools in the northern suburbs of Sydney. In Study 1 (N=296) and the preliminary phase of Study 3 (N=251), data from psychometric tests were analysed using principal component analysis to identify the dimensions of the Luria model and describe the aptitude profile of each subject.