Why Every Child Needs Good Brain Training

Schools are not equipped to help children reach their intellectual potentialAs much as we may like to believe it, schools are not perfect places in which to educate a child. While they may do their utmost within budgetary constraints to impart the knowledge and skills a child needs to function in the world as an adult, they simply cannot provide the one-to-one attention that a child needs to reach their full intellectual potential. Even if a parent is fortunate enough to afford private schooling of the highest standard, or private tutoring from leading scholars, this still cannot maximize intellectual development for a surprisingly simple reason: those experts don’t know what to teach to make that happen.

While an expensive tutoring company will boast about improvements in school grades, they achieve this only by “teaching to the examination”, whatever that may be; SATs, a University entrance exam, or whatever. In other words, intensive education usually focuses on knowledge content and some basic skills tested directly in examinations. None of this will enhance a child’s overall intellectual ability much. That approach simply does not provide practice at skills basic enough that learning itself becomes easier. And the reason that most education leaves the child knowing more, but not any smarter, is because until now educational psychologists and neuroscientists did not fully understand what skills precisely underlie “being smart”.

The Good News for Every ChildRecent psychology research in a field known as Relational Frame Theory, has identified what are known as “relational skills” as the basic building block skills that underlie intelligence. These relational skills are involved in understanding the relationship between things in the world. Understanding the relationships between a set of cousins, or understanding that a particular group of plants are all of the same kind (e.g., flowers), or understanding that a Poodle is a type of dog but a dog is not a type of poodle, are all examples of basic relational skills. But of course, relations between objects get more complicated than this. The relational skills you need to understand high-level mathematics or to read and speak well, are more advanced skills. The good news is that relational skills can be taught to any child through a form of “brain training”, and dozens of published research studies have now shown this, and argue that this is the kind of training every child needs to really maximize their potential in school and in life.

Relational skills brain training teaches a range of basic but crucial relational skills that help to sharpen intellectual ability. When these skills are improved, the research suggests, all intellectual tasks come easier. Relational skills training

make you a faster and better learner. It helps new information make more sense, and helps you think more clearly.

Because the school system does not directly teach relational skills, a child can quickly fall behind as they rote learn what is required to do well in school, but without the intellectual skill foundation to make that information meaningful and easy to remember. As a result, they can fall further and further behind over the years, as the effects of their poorly developed basic intellectual skills increase with the increasing demands of education. However, the identification of relational skills as the basic building blocks of intelligence, offers the possibility of remediating these deficits in a very efficient way so that educational efforts will be more effective and so that even disadvantaged children can reach their educational potential.

What Does Relational Skills Training Involve and Where can I get it?Currently, relational skills brain training, which is a form of brain training, is only available online at www.raiseyouriq.com. It can be taken by children or adults, and simply requires completing a series of game-like tasks, for a few short sessions each week, for several weeks. The training involves teaching the user how to answer blocks of logical questions, first with feedback, and then on their own without any help. The user is taught by the software how to solve these short logical problems, and is gently guided through increasingly difficult tasks that become increasingly easy for the user to solve.

The method employed at RaiseYourIQ.com was developed by behavioral psychologists over a decade of laboratory research, and is called SMART (which stands for Strengthening Mental Abilities with Relational Training). SMART teaches the user how to learn and how to think more clearly and logically.

Published research shows that SMART training increases the IQ scores (i.e., the standard measure of our intelligence level) of users by at least 10, and up to around 30 points, which represents a highly significant increase in intellectual ability. It also appears that a high starting intelligence level does not reduce the effects of the training, with intelligent children, becoming even more intelligent. This is because there is no limit to how relationally skilled a user can become. SMART training allows infinite improvement because users are encouraged to regularly revise stages of training that they have already mastered, and this helps them become more accurate and faster in solving problems. Even after completion they can continue to train at their own convenience. Our child users

typically attain at least a typical adult level of logical reasoning and ability following their training.

SMART brain training targets the foundational intellectual skills that underlie just about everything we do, but specifically the following activities rely heavily on relational skills.

Using vocabulary Understanding word meaning Grasping basic and advanced logic Remembering information Using numbers for mathematics

You can learn more about relational skill brain training at www.RaiseYourIQ.com, where you can also sign up for a free trial course.