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Program Scope
Bridges Learning Development serves learners of all ages and grade levels. This program applies brain science to nurture the learner’s cognitive abilities and perceptual skills, to raise achievement (guaranteed), reduce costs and contribute to comprehensive schoolwide reform.
Cognition is everything.
- Memory
- Concept formation
- Rule following
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- Process orientation
- Symbol decoding
- Context comprehension
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- Compare/Contrast
- Deductive reasoning
- Inference
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These are not ‘all or nothing’ abilities. Every student will develop all his/her cognition abilities to a lesser or greater degree, but each student may be expected to have a significant variability in the fitness and stamina of each different cognitive ability. Therefore, Bridges addresses the student’s individual profile of weaker and stronger cognitive abilities so all students may maximize their mental powers before they encounter instruction that depends upon those very powers.
Perception is attentiveness. It is the basis of education. While 80 percent of what we perceive is visual information, our visual sense must be neurologically integrated with the other four of our ‘far senses,’ those which respond to both auditory and visual stimuli. Simultaneously, the brain, the spinal cord and the nerves – the whole Central Nervous System – must integrate the dozen or so ‘near senses’ that we neither direct nor feel, such as our senses of posture, balance and physical synchronization.
Each of our students’ multiple senses – far and near senses – is a receiver tuned to a distinct feature of the 360-degree world around them. To cognize the classroom, students must present adequately developed perceptual skills to the task. Otherwise, cognition may be impeded by eyestrain, shallow depth perception, poor auditory and visual sequencing, poor auditory and visual concentration; and/or clumsiness, hesitation, withdrawal, messiness, disorganization, or perfunctory engagement.
Perceptual dysfunctions are often silent or invisible impairments. Intervention should prevent students from failing to reach their potential – from diluting instructional efforts – from diminishing overall campus performance – from distracting the classroom – from damaging the learning and teaching environment for everybody.
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