These days, there are constant reports in the media of school grades being better than ever before, and of schools being of higher standard every year. Many have suspicions about these results, and these suspicions are generally put down to the exams becoming easier, however until now no one has seriously considered that children’s cognitive abilities have declined, past academic performance.

Michael Shayer of King’s College University of London investigated this issue, and ultimately concluded that in terms of cognitive development, 11 and 12 year olds (in Year 7) are “now on average between two and three years behind where they were 15 years ago”. A key issue Shayer faced in his investigations was being able to define ability. In other words he needed to establish a model which could accurately and scientifically assess children’s cognitive capabilities. From this he identified the Piagetian developmental model as being the most practical, as it had “an underlying, logic-based, theoretical model to differentiate different levels of complexity”.

Piaget identified four stages that a child goes through in development, sensorimotor (infancy), pre-concrete (up to age 5), concrete (5-11) and formal (11-16). Shayer conducted tests with 14,000 school children in order to assess their capability according to the Piagetian scale. Naturally, Shayer put his focus into the concrete and formal stages. Concrete was assessed through a child’s ability to put things in order, use descriptive models and plot simple graphs. The formal stage was assessed using abstract concepts, and the ability to predict.

Shayer’s results showed that Piaget had only described the top 20% of the population. Shayer’s finding contradicted Piaget’s predictions, in that Piaget estimated that the average 11 year old would be firmly in the formal stage of development, whereas Shayer found that the average 11 year old was in the middle of the concrete stage.

Shayer generated a large amount of criticism based on his findings. In the educationalists found it hard to comprehend the idea that children were less able than originally thought, and refused to believe that development was largely affected by a variety of factors, not purely environmental influences. The biggest objection however came from those who argued that Piagetian tests only assessed a child’s ability in terms of those particular functions, not performance in general. However this was disproved by Shayer’s “subsequent work in the 1980s”, said Paul Black, emeritus professor of education at King’s College.

From his research Shayer created two year intervention programmes for children who were identified as below average on the Piagetian scale in Year 7. These intervention programmes were based on science and maths, but were primarily to improve general developmental skills. These interventions were seen to significantly improve children’s Piagetian scores, along with their maths and science GCSEs, which somewhat validated Shayer’s research.