Reuven Feuerstein - Theories and Applied Systems

Theories and Applied Systems

Reuven Feuerstein was one of nine siblings born in Botoșani, Romania (August 21, 1921). He attended the Teachers College in Bucharest (1940–41) and Onesco College in Bucharest (1942–44). Due to the Nazi invasion, Feuerstein fled to save his life before obtaining his degree in psychology. After settling in Mandate Palestine in 1945, he taught child survivors of the Holocaust until 1948. He saw that these children whose families and cultures had been destroyed in the Holocaust needed attention. Thus, he began a career that attended to the psychological and educational needs of immigrant refugee children.

While attending the University of Geneva, Feuerstein studied under Andre Rey and Jean Piaget. He completed his degrees in both General and Clinical psychology. During this time there were three main schools of thought, “Psychoanalysis, Behaviorism, and Gestalt Psychology.” He attended lectures given by Karl Jaspers, Carl Jung, Barbel Inhelder, Marguerite Loosli Uster and Léopold Szondi. In 1970, Feuerstein earned his PhD in Developmental Psychology at the University of Sorbonne, in France. His major areas of study were Developmental, Clinical, and Cognitive psychology.

Feuerstein served as Director of Psychological Services of Youth Aliyah in Europe (Immigration for young people). This service was responsible for assigning prospective Jewish candidates for emigration from all over the European continent to various educational programs in Israel. In the 1950s he was involved in research on Moroccan, Jewish, and Berber children in collaboration with several members of the “Genevan” school. Upon their arrival, the children were subjected to a series of tests, including IQ tests. Their poor results did not surprise Feuerstein. However, he did question them and noticed that whenever he intervened, the children’s performance improved.

The improvement Feuerstein witnessed in victims after they received extra psychological and educational attention made Feuerstein question current beliefs regarding the stability of intelligence. “What if, instead of measuring a child’s acquired knowledge and intellectual skills, the ability to learn was evaluated first? And what if intelligence was not a fixed attributed, measurable once and for all? What if intelligence can be taught and was in fact the ability to learn?” (p. 10) It was at this point that Feuerstein broke away from the conventional thinking of his time. He elaborated new methods of evaluation as well as new teaching tools. Today this is what is known as Dynamic Assessment.

Feuerstein continued to gather data that supported his ideas about the importance of education and meeting children's psychological needs in fostering success in school and high intelligence scores. “It was during this period that much of the psychological data was gathered that contributed to my development of concepts of cultural differences and cultural deprivations” Some children who were considered un-teachable reached the stage where they were accepted at normal school and studied successfully. This period was also seminal in the development of his working hypothesis concerning low functioning children and their potential for change.

His interest came from observing the difficulties experienced by the new immigrant students coping with unfamiliar learning environment that he saw as culturally "deprived.” He describes culturally “different” children as children who receive an adequate amount and type of Mediated Learning Experience (MLE) in their native culture and who face the challenges of adapting to a new culture. These children are expected to have good learning potential. On the contrary, culturally “deprived” are those children who, for one reason or another, were deprived on MLE in their native culture or children who show a reduction in learning potential.

Comparisons have also been made between Feuerstein’s theories and those of the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky. Vygotsky viewed a child’s interaction with the world as mediated by symbolic tools provided by the given culture. Like the social psychologist, Feuerstein gave further insight on cognitive functioning such as logical memory, voluntary attention, categorical perception and self-regulation of behavior. Feuerstein filled a theoretical gap with his theory of Mediated Learning Experience in which he assigns the major role to a human mediator. According to Feuerstein, all learning interactions can be divided into direct learning and mediated learning. Learning mediated by another human being is indispensable for a child because the mediator helps the child develop prerequisites that then make direct learning effective.

Although the Theory of Mediated Learning Experience which Feuerstein developed, the heart of MLE is the theory of Structural Cognitive Modifiability which explains the modifiability of deficient cognitive functions. He argued that person’s capability to learn is not solely determined by one’s genetic make-up; but is on the contrary, cognitive enhancement is through mediation. "Cognitive enhancement in SCM refers not merely to the development of specific behavior but also to changes of a “structural nature" (i.e. internal changes in cognition rather than external changes in behavior). Feuerstein said he was deeply influenced by Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, whom he would correspond with, and who would refer him patients.

Unlike previous developmental psychologists, the focus of Feuerstein’s theories is the development of normal versus low functioning children. According to Piaget, it is through the normal child’s own natural material actions and problem-solving experiences that mind and intelligence eventually evolve toward the development of logic and abstract thinking. Feuerstein illustrates that the key to meaningful instruction for all children, particularly young and low-functioning children, is the mediated relationship.