The following cognitive skills are developed gradually over time. This is the stuff that we need to learn how to do in order to function well in the world. . The more proficient you are at these skills, the smarter you appear and the more you can learn:

Conceptual Processes

1. Prediction: Making a prediction about the outcome of actions
2. Modeling: Building a conscious model of a process
3. Experimentation: Finding out for oneself what works and what doesn’t
4. Evaluation: Improving our ability to determine the value of something on many different dimensions

Analytic Processes

5. Diagnosis: Making a diagnosis of a complex situation by identifying relevant factors and seeking causal explanations
6. Planning: Learning to plan and do needs analysis as well as acquiring a conscious and subconscious understanding of what goals are satisfied by what plans
7. Causation: Detecting what has caused a sequence of events to occur by relying upon a case base of previous knowledge of similar situations
8. Judgment: Making an objective judgment

Social Processes

9. Influence: Understanding how others respond to your requests and recognizing consciously and unconsciously how to improve the process
10. Teamwork: Learning how to achieve goals by using a team, consciously allocating roles, managing inputs from others, coordinating actors, and handling conflicts; managing operations using a model of processes and handling real time issues
11. Negotiation: Making a deal; negotiation/contracts; resolving goal conflicts
12. Describing: Creating conscious descriptions of situations to explain them to others in writing and orally

One’s intelligence is typically judged by others in relation to one’s proficiency at five of these cognitive skills:

• Prediction
• Diagnosis
• Causation
• Describing
• Planning

Schools only deal with some of these skills and rarely attack them directly, instead choosing to focus on subjects rather than thinking ability. It is not impossible to learn how to do these things while studying school subjects, but it is much more difficult because teaching almost never emphasizes them. These skills in no way depend on any particular subject and can and should be learned without reference to subject matter knowledge. People have different interests as far as subjects go, but everyone has a deep need to become proficient at these skills in any area they pursue. The fact that school has been organized around subjects is one reason why the students produced by that system are not capable of thinking very clearly.

Alternative Learning Places - Engines for Education and Socratic Arts are opening learning centers where a small group of children learn by doing planned activities that they are interested in. The Alternative Learning Placess will give parents and their children an alternative to our broken education system. Visit the Alternative Learning Places website for more information.

Roger Schank has a new book coming out: Cognition! Teaching kids to think. Preview the updated first four chapters of the book or email your friends about the book. (Preview last updated 13 November 2009.)

Engines for Education is proud to announce the formation of the world’s first alternative online, learn by doing, high school. This is a four-year high school where only one curriculum is followed each year. Students will be admitted into this curriculum in September, 2010. They will matriculate at schools that have agreed to offer this curriculum.

Learn more about the Alternative High School.

VISTA's Year in Health Sciences is now open for enrollment! Engines for Education announces that, due to the generous support of The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, we have completed our first full-year Story-Centered Curriculum in Health Sciences. Read more about what the curriculum involves and how you can enroll.

The first students have begun VISTA's Health Science Story-Centered Curriculum and the results are impressive! See what people are saying about the curriculum and the work students are completing.

The Software Development program is open for enrollment! In this series of story-centered curricula students are immersed in the world of developing modern web pages, from simple web pages to interactive websites with databases. During the process students will develop skills in the programming languanges needed to accomplish theses tasks as they learn by doing.

Read more about what the Software Development program entails.

Introducing Grandparent Games, Roger Schank's new idea for teaching reading and math online to little kids. Inspired by his desire to interact with his new grandson who lived in a different state, Roger's innovative design is now available for other grandparents.

Read more about Grandparent Games and how you can build a relationship with your grandchild while contributing to their early education.

Read Roger's blog on Grandparent Games to see how it is working out with his own grandchildren.

Take Grandparent Games with you with Roger's iPhone of iPod Touch apps. Five Little Monkeys, Alphabet Animations, and more. See all of Grandparent Games' iPhone Apps.

With your help, we can change how people view education and give our children an alternative to the antiquated, ineffective teaching methods that plague our schools.

Learn how you can get involved and start to make a difference.

• Participate in VISTA's Year in Health Sciences curriculum.
• Adopt the Story-Centered Curriculum for the schools in your area.
• Implement the Story-Centered Curriculum for your company's training needs.
• Support our efforts through a tax-deductible donation.
  

Watch Roger Schanks' lecture, the Cognitive Process that Underlie Learning to learn more about how education should be designed.

Read Roger's column Educational Outrage to learn more about why education needs to be reformed.

Read Roger Schank's two-page white paper All you ever need to know about learning.

See the reaction to Roger's June visit to Brigham Young University.

See Roger Schank discussing the Business of Innovation on CNBC.

Watch Roger discuss education reform.
Mira Roger hablar de la reforma de la educación.