Cognitive and Social Challenges, Essay Example

What do you consider to be the major cognitive and social challenges experienced by students from diverse cultures in a mainstream American classroom?

In mainstream America today, the teachers face a number of cognitive and social challenges in the education field.  A lot of issues are applicable to immigrants who arrive in the USA with a poor command of English and little understanding of the cultural and social demands as contrasted with their point of origin.  Case study illustrations show that immigrants arriving from the third world have a tougher time of it from a cognitive abilities viewpoint.  Many struggle to gain an adequate command of the English language through reading and writing skills and developing above average communication skills.  This is particularly true of the poorer immigrants who tend to gather in native communities i.e. consider the Hispanic population in Florida.  This tends to create social inferiority complexes and the students have low self-esteem in their school relationships (Birman, D. 2007)

It was Snow and Lohman[1] that moved the cognitive concept forward in the late 1960’s by stating the importance of information processing structures in cognitive thinking; the nature of how people might acquire knowledge, store it and process it. The sociocognitive perspective holds particular challenges for education and what we need to determine about students i.e.  the targets of inference, how students behave in different environmental conditions, the assessment of arguments and reasoning and how they interact in real world situations. The cognitive models will help to provide frameworks for improved understanding, better perception and action based learning techniques. (Mislevy, 2008)

Social challenges include the large attrition rate of teachers, the lack of parental involvement in the teaching and education process; the latter being considered one of the contributory factors in the teaching attrition rates. Finally that of the reading epidemic in the USA and the lack of students ability to read according to their grade. This is having a devastating impact on student education with an estimated 8 million US students being unable to read.  (Hamil, 2008)

[1] Cognitive revolution of the 1960’s; later exemplified by Newell and Simons (1972) Human Information Processing paper.