Assessment of Cognitive Capabilities at School Level

Cognitive abilities are brain-based skills we need to carry out any task from the simplest to the most complex way. They have more to do with the mechanisms of how we learn, remember, problem-solve, and pay attention rather than with any actual knowledge. Cognitive refers to the inner processes and products of the mind that lead to knowing. . According to Piaget around age 11 young people enter the formal operational stage, in which they develop the capacity for abstract scientific thinking whereas concrete operational children can operate on reality. The objective was to assess cognitive capabilities of government and private school students. An Ex- post facto research was done on 120 students from government and private school during 2013-2014 sessions. Multistage random sampling technique was used for drawing samples from various schools. The data was analysed by using SPSS version 20. Cognitive capabilities test during transition period (by P. Vasundhara 2007) was used to assess the cognitive capabilities of individual student. The scale had three parts and each part has to be filled in assigned time duration. There exists a large variation between government and private school student cognitive capabilities. Significant differences were noticed between cognitive capabilities of government and private school students.