In this text the authors deal with methodological questions relating to the assessment of cognitive stimulation programmes included in the traditional system of school education. The Israeli Professor R. Feuerstein‘s programme of Instrumental Enrichment is used as a concrete example for discussion of the problematic aspects of evaluation studies. This programme was chosen on account of the relatively large number of research studies on it abroad, and also because in recent years ever more trained professionals have been working with it in the Czech Republic. Unlike other cognitive stimulation approaches, this programme is not entirely unknown to the Czech public.
Instrumental enrichment is presented here in broader context as part of the problem of capacity and skill in thinking, which is a theme that is very widespread above all in educational and psychological literature written in English. Discussion of cognitive skills involves questions of the possibility or impossibility of teaching or developing thinking with direct relationship to a concrete school project of field of human activity. Feuerstein‘s Instrumental Enrichment, the efficacy of which this article attempts to assess, is a model programme not bound to any particular subject.
The purpose of this text is to present IE in the conclusions of different research studies and address the issue of why these conclusions often diverge so significantly and why individual evaluation studies provide no clear confirmation of the effect of IE in raising intelligence, which was the original goal of the programme as defined by its author (Feu-erstein 1980) On the basis of the foreign and domestic works the author concludes that the problems are rooted largely in the character of the diagnostic instruments and in the way that they are used, and also in the difficulties accompanyingthe realisation of IE in practice ((Feuerstein recommends working with the programme for a minimum of three times weekly for two years (and last but not least the uneven capacity of IE lectors to fulfil the conditions of Mediated Learning, which is the approach on which the successful realisation of IE is predicated. (Feurestein 1999)