By Betsy Hill and Roger Stark
Schools nationwide are actively seeking solutions to address the learning loss caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. As district leaders evaluate effective strategies to support students, it is important to heed the observation from the Kennedy Forum: “Neuroscience research now proves what parents have known all along. Even the best teaching and curricula have surprisingly little effect when a child’s cognitive and emotional readiness to learn is not addressed.”
Many innovative schools are responding by adopting programs that target each student’s cognitive and emotional readiness to learn. These approaches combine a nationally normed, scientifically valid and reliable cognitive assessment with an evidence-based cognitive training regimen. The assessment reveals each student’s cognitive strengths and weaknesses, giving teachers actionable insights to personalize instruction. The training, drawing on more than 40 years of multidisciplinary clinical collaboration, is delivered in an engaging, game-like format designed to develop the core mental processes that support learning.
Cognitive assessment helps teachers understand how students process information, pay attention, remember, and plan. Armed with that information, teachers can use differentiated, evidence-based strategies that align instruction to each student’s readiness. Cognitive training—often called brain training—works to strengthen the underlying processes that make academic learning efficient and sustainable. While disciplines such as speech and language therapy, vision development, and occupational therapy have long offered targeted interventions, comprehensive cognitive programs integrate multiple skill areas so gains are coordinated and transferable to classroom tasks.
Historically, classrooms have focused on subject instruction—reading, mathematics, science—because that is what teachers are trained to teach. But the cognitive skills that precede and enable those subjects—working memory, processing speed, attention control, and visual-spatial processing—are rarely taught in standard teacher preparation. As Tom Hughes, principal of Middle Crest STEM Middle School in Kokomo, IN, explains: “I went through literacy and fluency training and even hold a reading specialist credential, but we were never taught how to strengthen the basic cognitive skills that come before comprehension—skills like being able to ‘see’ more quickly or hold more information in working memory. When those foundational processes are impaired, teaching higher-level skills alone is insufficient.”
Because cognitive skills are not easily conveyed through traditional classroom explanation, one-on-one therapeutic approaches have traditionally been required to develop them. Today, technology-based cognitive training makes that kind of targeted development scalable and practical for schools. Not all computer-based programs are equal: effective training must be comprehensive, integrate skills as they develop so they work together, and be sufficiently engaging to sustain repeated practice. Programs that lack these characteristics are less likely to produce meaningful transfer to academic achievement and everyday functioning.
How much can learning capacity be improved? Research shows meaningful gains are possible in a relatively short time. For example, a study using cognitive training software with students diagnosed with specific learning disabilities (SLD) employed the Woodcock-Johnson Cognitive Battery and achievement tests before and after 12 weeks of training (sessions of 30–45 minutes, three to five times per week). On pre-test measures these students averaged about 63–64 percent proficiency compared with the expected 90 percent for typically developing peers. After 12 weeks of targeted cognitive training, the trained group’s average proficiency rose to 89 percent, nearly closing the gap; a control group showed no change. The study demonstrates that deliberate cognitive development can substantially accelerate academic readiness for students who start behind.
Beyond measurable gains in cognitive scores and academic achievement, teachers and parents commonly report improvements in students’ persistence, confidence in learning, willingness to tackle challenging tasks, and social engagement. In short, cognitive training supports both the cognitive and emotional readiness that neuroscience—and parents’ intuition—identify as essential for effective learning. For many schools, integrating assessment-driven cognitive training offers a pragmatic, research-informed path to helping students recover from COVID-related learning setbacks and to strengthening their capacity for future learning.
About the authors
Betsy Hill is President of BrainWare Learning Company, an organization focused on applying neuroscience to build learning capacity. An experienced educator, she has studied the connection between neuroscience and education with experts including Dr. Patricia Wolfe, author of Brain Matters. Betsy has served as chair of the board of trustees at Chicago State University, teaches strategic thinking in the MBA program at Lake Forest Graduate School of Management, and holds an MAT and an MBA from Northwestern University.
Roger Stark is Co-founder and CEO of the BrainWare Learning Company. For more than a decade he has led efforts to make comprehensive, affordable cognitive literacy skills training and assessment widely available. Roger guided the development of BrainWare SAFARI, an extensively researched, integrated online cognitive training tool designed to improve foundational cognitive processes that underpin academic learning.