Intensive Holiday Courses

Results — Intensive Holiday Courses:

The intention of our intensive holiday courses is first and foremost to improve cognitive abilities — attention, visual and auditory processing, memory, et cetera. We use our cognitive abilities to acquire knowledge; they can be considered our tools for learning.

Increase in IQ

While an IQ score is certainly not the sum of a person’s cognitive abilities, it is one criterion that can be used to compare a person’s cognitive ability to that of the general population.

Ten youngsters with severe learning difficulties were tested on the South African Intelligence Scale before starting a two-week intensive course, and again after receiving 40 hours of one-on-one instruction. Their ages were between 7 and 18.

The increases in verbal, non-verbal and full scale IQ were highly significant according to the two-tailed t-test.

	Before	After
Verbal IQ Subtests
Vocabulary	7.6	7.9
Comprehension	10.0	10.8
Verbal Reasoning	9.1	10.0
Problems	6.3	6.8
Memory	8.5	10.5
Mean Verbal IQ	85.4	91.0	Increase significant at the 0.001 level
Non-Verbal IQ Subtests
Pattern Completion	8.4	8.7
Block Design	8.2	10.3
Absurdities	9.4	9.6
Form Board	11.1	15.3
Mean Non-Verbal IQ	92.6	105.1	Increase significant at the 0.001 level
MEAN FULL SCALE IQ	87.0	97.1	Increase significant at the 0.001 level

An M.Ed. study by Wynand de Wet has shown that our program increases IQ scores significantly in less than 30 hours and when used in a group. He applied our program to a group of deaf children; their average non-verbal IQ increased by 11.6 points in 27.5 hours of tuition, done over a period of time.

In short, 30 to 40 hours of tuition is generally sufficient to place a learner in a higher cognitive level — low average moves up to average, average to high average, et cetera.

Improved reading skills

As research has shown, enhanced cognitive abilities lead to improved reading, spelling and learning skills. Many reading programs offer to improve reading skills, but only those grounded in cognitive assessment and training achieve the established, long-term results.

Below is the pre- and post ophthalmograph results of one Grade 4 learner who attended a two-week intensive course. Her relative reading efficiency level increased by two and a half years! While not all learners will gain as much, even a one-year gain in reading efficiency can change a child’s life.