異常行動心理学

Dynamic Assessment: Mechanisms Underlying Cognitive Modifiability

Abstract

Hiwa Weisi* and Khosro Bahramlou

Dynamic Assessment, as an umbrella term, covers a myriad of educational approaches that employ instructional interventions in the assessment process to assess a learner’s current capabilities, to provide a prognosis of his development potential, to promote the realization of that potential, and ultimately to effect enduring structural changes in the learner’s cognition such that the learner would eventually be capable of independent functioning, problem solving, and adaptation to the life circumstances to which he might be exposed. In this position paper, we adopt a three-tier conception of cognitive modifiability at psychological, systems, and cellular levels. At the psychological level, research has clearly demonstrated that cognitive modifiability is a fact of life and that cognition, and by implication, humans are malleable, open systems capable of change for the better or worse. Literature suggests that memory mechanisms of consolidation and reconsolidation at cellular and systems levels could be invoked to explain the cognitive modifiability at psychological level. Neuro-scientific evidence indicates that each time a consolidated memory is recalled and the neuronal ensemble holding that memory is exited, the relevant neurons enter a labile volatile state. Through protein synthesis, release of chemicals, and changes in Neuro-electric signals, these neurons could re-stabilize themselves and reconsolidate a reconstructed and thus, modified version of the original memory. In systems consolidation, molecularly consolidated memories of one brain system transfer to another brain system and undergo a second more time-consuming phase of consolidation there over a period of weeks to years. Reactivation of a memory in the target system temporarily turns it into an unstable trace and sends it to the source system, later to be reconsolidated to a target system memory again.