Cognitive skills are the underlying mental skills and tools of learning that enable us to successfully think, prioritize, plan, understand, visualize, remember, create useful associations, and solve problems.
When cognitive skills are strong, academic learning is fast, easy, efficient, and even fun but when cognitive skills are weak, academic learning is at best a struggle or even impossible. They are essential tools of effective learning and mental mechanisms that process incoming information.
Cognitive skills are NOT academic subjects which are taught in the classroom. Those are academic skills or disciplines. Academics consist of an accumulation of knowledge, rules, and systems concerning different subjects like algebra, history, spelling, and foreign language.
Cognitive skills are the core skills which the brain uses to think, read, learn, remember, reason, and pay attention. These skills work in concert with one another, and they take incoming information and move it into the bank of knowledge that we use every day at school, at work, and in life.Examples of cognitive skills are: Attention, Working Memory, Processing Speed, Visual Processing, Long-Term Memory, Logical Reasoning, and Comprehension.
Attention – If attention skills are deficient, staying on a task for long periods of time or ignoring distractions would be a problem which could limit the ability of other mental skills. This can affect all areas work. Attention can be split into: Selective(attending to the most important things in an environment), Sustained(Staying focused for a sustained period), and Divided attention(ability to accomplish two or more tasks at the same time).
Working Memory – If you cannot retain information long enough to properly handle that information, learning will suffer.
Processing Speed – If the processing speed is slow, the information held in working memory may be lost before it can be used, requiring to start over again.
Visual Processing – If visual manipulation or visual imagery is poor then those tasks that require seeing in your head (math word problems, and comprehension, etc.) will suffer.
Long-Term Memory – If the abilities to store and retrieve information easily are poor, then wrong conclusions and answers will result.
Auditory Processing – If blending, segmenting and sound analysis are poorly developed, then sounding out words when reading or spelling will be very difficult and result in errors.
Logical Reasoning – If these abilities are poor, then problem solving, math, and comprehension will be poor.
Comprehension – If comprehension is deficient, understanding and making sense of new information will suffer.
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