Who Can Benefit?

IE for Children and Young Adults

Any child or adult can benefit from Professor Feuerstein's programmes. The following are examples of those who have benefited:

• Children and adults who do not achieve their potential due to unfavourable family, social or cultural circumstances
  
• Children and adults with congenital or acquired learning disabilities
  
• Children, adolescents and adults who have difficulty learning and working primarily due to emotional problems
  
• Children and adolescents who are bright or gifted underachievers
  
• Children, young persons and adults with learning difficulties, both within mainstream schools or special settings, at college, in educational training programmes and at work

The following diagram adapted by Billy O'Neill illustrates a systemic approach using Feuerstein's methods to prepare students for learning in the 21 st century.

IE for Business

Feuerstein's methods have been successfully employed with business and industry. Many industries are beginning to introduce IE as part of continuing adult education programmes focused on teaching effective thinking strategies, communication skills, and methods of organisation to increase efficiency.

IE for Persistent Offenders

There is evidence of a high degree of impulsiveness among prisoners. This involves making ill-thought-out errors, replying without thinking, a disruptive inability to settle down and work and an inability to delay gratification.

Evidence suggests that prisoners are less likely to recognise the relevance of their behaviour to their future. They have difficulty understanding the relationship between cause and effect in relating past activities to the present. Many prisoners are egocentric, and therefore, are unable to predict, anticipate or identify with their behaviour or feelings. Research on juvenile delinquency shows that much of it is ‘situational’ in character. An opportunity for some sort of criminal act emerges and is taken by an adolescent on an unthinking impulse.

Feuerstein’s mediated learning through Instrumental Enrichment offers the opportunity for reinforcing offending adolescents’ cognitive control over their actions. This, in turn, could save them from breaking into potentially disastrous patterns of behaviour which could cause them to become entrenched criminals.

 

IE for Parenting

A Mediational approach to Teaching and Learning