Abstract:

The study around cognitive development, more specifically intelligence, is to the history of psychology as the assessment of human capabilities is to the history of humanity. It is therefore no coincidence that intelligence and its inherent questions of definition, evaluation and development have and continue to dominate psychological inquiry. Although it is one of the most studied subjects in the history of Psychology, since the 80's, the subject of intelligence has gained the interest of researchers, with the impact of some innovative publications. This research aims to characterize the cognitive development, namely the intelligence of primary school students and to explore the relationship between cognitive development and its sociodemographic variables. In this study 1300 students from the 3rd year of the primary school participated. For this purpose, Raven's Coloured Progressive Matrices was used to evaluate cognitive development and a sociodemographic questionnaire was built into the scope of the present research. The results showed that there were strong positive correlations between the various series of the Raven Colour Matrices, and that the participants presented superior results in the set Ab, followed by the set A and later the set B, with significant differences between the results obtained in these sets and the results obtained in the Ab set. Almost half of the participants were also found to have low or very low cognitive development. There was also found an influence of sociodemographic variables in students' cognitive development. However, a surprising result was obtained when the place of data collection (Porto or Lisbon) was compared to the percentiles of the participating students, with the Lisbon students being in lower percentiles compared to the Porto students. Results were compared with findings from previous research and reviewed in the context of the current literature on the school psychologist's role. Implications for the field are also provided.

Keywords:

Cognitive development, Primary school, Education, Students, School success.