Cognitive sciences for academic success of middle school students
Abstract
Territorial vulnerabilities subdue children at risk of difficulties at school in the Normandy region. We examined benefits of a personalized accompaniment based on the cognitive sciences on academic success of middle school students. We recruited middle school 6th graders students in Normandy. The experimental college included 52 students (m = 11;4 years; sd = 3 months) who benefited from pedagogical program based on cognitive sciences, was compared to the control college included 48 students (m = 11;3 years; sd = 6 months) who received classic pedagogical program of methodology. All students were interviewed before and after one year of teaching. We used the Children Memory Scale (Cohen, 2001) to assess students’ attention and national tests to assess academic performance in reading comprehension and numeracy. Students were assigned a global score for each test. We conducted repeated-measures analysis of variance for each global score. We observed significant interaction between Group (experimental vs. control) and Test (pré- vs. post-test) on attention score (F(1;97)=16.05 ; p<.0001 ; ηp2=.14) and on numeracy global score (F(1;97)=8.46 ; p<.005 ; ηp2=.08) considering age as covariable in analysis. The results showed that the pedagogical program based on cognitive sciences significantly improves students’ attention and enhances performances improvement of 6th graders in numeracy after one year of implementation compared to a classic pedagogical program. Our proposed pedagogical program seems to be one of the possible levers to promote the success of all middle school students while promoting a scientific approach to evaluating educational practices.