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Cognitive impairments.

3. Mechanical reciting in place of understanding.

4. Lack of understanding the concept of quantity.

5. Lack of understanding the concepts of cause and effect or result.

6. Difficulty in interpreting a picture into a verbal story.

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 Physical impairments that lead to cognitive impairments.

Poor bilateral coordination of both hands and the short attention span are most fundamental abilities that affect other cognitive operations. Therefore, there is the need to detail here some physiological aspects of them that the hot water massage and the Robb ointment affect.

1.  Poor bilateral Coordination of both hands is mainly a physical disability that is determined by the impaired neural network of certain regions in the brain. Using both hands expand the range of experiences and consequently the scope of things the infant can learn and achieve in his or her cognitive development. When using the right dominant hand in drawing for example, the activity of the brain is in its left hemisphere. When in addition to the right hand, the child uses his or her the left nondominant hand in supporting the paper, the activity of the brain is in both left and right hemispheres [167]. It means that using the nondominant hand with the dominant hand requires more neural connections. Our failure to improve the ability of the children to use both hands in drawing and building with Lego bricks in Creative Foundation School can be attribute mainly to the application of the hot water and the Robb ointment on their heads when they were babies. The hot water and the Robb ointment affect the growth of neurons, their connections through synapses and the forming of the foundation for the future networks of neurons. Certainly, the hot water and the Robb ointment can affect the neural connections between the two hemispheres of the brain. It is not a permanent impairment because the children gradually learn to use both hands when they are 5 to 6 years old. However, this is a very late age for using both hand and it is almost 3 years of delay compared to children in other cultures that do not pass the treatment of hot water massage on their heads.

2. Attention span

Attention span is the time that a person focuses in observing an object. Observation is not mere looking but watching and seeing the details and processing the information in the brain. Attention span depends a lot on the synaptic plasticity and stability. Healthy neurons and synapses, and multi connections between neurons and between different areas in the brain are necessary for the following cognitive functions: storage of information in hierarchy of complex information that is supported by simple information, and integration of new information into old information. Damages to the synapses and the neurons as a result of applying the hot water on the head of a baby and smearing Robb ointment on it, is detailed in "Structural changes under hyperthermia" and "Molecular changes under hyperthermia" pages.  This destruction of neural network can lead to a weak working memory, a partial consolidation of memory, and not organized long-term memory. As a result of the weak neural network, the child relies more on mechanical reciting that demands less complicated neural network. Children in Nursery should be able to concentrate for a few minutes (up to 6 minutes), while children in Primary 1 should be able to concentrate between 12 to 18 minutes. The children in Creative Foundation School could concentrate only for a few seconds even in Primary 1. Such sort of attention span affected the children ability to connect pieces of puzzle into a correct picture, and the ability of the children to give a good answer on a question that demanded observing an object.

  

Cognitive impairments:

3. Reciting in place of processing an input of information.

Reciting is a powerful tool of learning, and it is done by repetitions. A child learns many basic activities, such as eating with spoon or fork or tying his or her shoelace by repetition of the action again and again. Also, more abstract things are learnt by reciting, such as names and numbers. Students are helped by reciting and memorizing the timetable and symbols in chemistry. Actors memorize text to be perform. Reciting and memorizing make us more familiar with certain information and then we can perform more comprehensible task with the information that requires higher cognitive operations such as reasoning, solving problem and creativity. However, we use here the term Mechanical reciting, which means that no understanding was involve in the process of memorizing. It can be compared to reciting of 6 digits that we saw in an instant. It does not involve any processing of the information in the working memory or a meaningful storage of it in the long-term memory. We saw mechanical reciting among the children in Creative Foundation school in the following cases:

• In answering a question: once one of the pupils answered, all the rest of the children repeated on the answer of that pupil.

• In answering a question on a specific event in a story: the child recited all what he or she remembered from the story. The child recalled all the story which contained relevant and irrelevant details as well.

In these ways of reciting there is no understanding. Therefore, the working memory that should have been involved in the learning process was not. 

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4. Concrete learning of quantity and abstract learning of quantity.

Quantities are expressed by numbers and numbers are expressed by digits. However, digits are meaningless unless they are connected in our brain to numbers and quantities. The connection between all these is not by instinct and it has to be taught. Learning how to count numbers by order such as from 1 to 10 alone does not give the sense of quantity unless it is accompanied by counting objects which demonstrates the meaning of quantity.  Skipping on this can create problem in learning advance math. 

The problem that appeared with the Kindergarten children were:

• They learnt with difficulty to say the last number that they counted as the representative of the quantity of objects the counted.

• They could not perceive changes in the quantity.

These led us to think that they actually could not understand the meaning of quantity even at the end of Kindergarten 2, age, 6 years old. Their working memory processed the new information in a shaky way, unable yet to form steady and reliable information that would be stored in the long-term memory.

This led to the confusion between (+) and (-) because understanding the change in quantity is the base for understanding the addition and subtraction functions. The confusion between (+) and (-) was not as a result of the similarity in the shapes of (+) and (-) because the children in Creative Foundation School did not confuse between similar letter such as 'm' and 'n'.

As these children would progress in learning math according to the syllabus, they will face more challenges. The lack of understanding that numbers represent changes in quantities will lead them eventually to poor performance in math as discussed in "The hierarchy structure in learning math" page.

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5. Detecting an error - Everyday life experience as a cognitive tool in understanding the connection between cause and effect or result. 

When we talk about science we usually think about the hidden or the micro world that is not seen by the naked eyes such as the molecules, but science is all around us. When children learn about the simple scientific facts of life, this information is reinforced in their memory by confirming it with their daily life experience. Such as that if there are no clouds in the sky, it is not possible that it would rain at the same time. This daily life experience reinforces the information the children learn in school that rain comes from the clouds. Or in other words, the information of clouds and rain is processed by the working memory in terms of cause and effect or result. It is stored in the long-term memory not only as separate concepts of clouds and rain but as two concepts that one causes the other, meaning, clouds are the cause of the rain, or the rain is the effect or result of the clouds.

When we gave children in Kindergarten 2, three pictures and to the children in Primary 1, four pictures to arrange as a story, we expected from them to arrange the picture to an event that would fit their daily life experience.  In both cases, the failure to arrange correctly was because they paid attention to the most noticeable feature that led them to ignore their daily life experience. 

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 6. Difficulty in interpreting a picture into a verbal story.

interpretation of a picture into a story was a difficult task for the children in Primary 1 in Creative Foundation School. In teaching math, we used pictures that described an action of addition or subtraction depending on the direction of the arrow in the picture. The children could neither tell the story in the picture nor they could formulate an addition or a subtraction math formula by themselves.  

 

The poor performance of the children in Creative Foundation School can explain the repetitive poor academic performance of the Ghanaian students upon endless effort to improve the method of teaching in Ghana.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ The model of weak working memory and not organized long-term memory  is the result of impaired structure of neurons in the brain. No method of teaching can repair the destruction of neurons caused by the hot water massage and the application of the Robb ointments on the head of a baby. 

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