It became almost a cliché to say that in the twenty-first century education cannot be based on teaching specific content and skills but should focus on “learning how to learn” and on the development of more general cognitive abilities. There are two major proposals for handling this problem. The first suggests focusing on students’ general cognitive and problem-solving skills which can then be applied in any content area. The second proposal is to develop cognitive strategies “inside” the curricular areas. The first approach thus calls for an addition of a new learning subject – “cognitive lessons” – while the second presupposes a rather radical reform of curricular teaching/learning that would assign cognitive goals to subject lessons. “Instrumental Enrichment” is analyzed as an example of a standalone cognitive program that develops such general skills as analytic perception, comparison, and classification that can then be “bridged” to curricular material. The cognitive infusion approaches propose to infuse cognitive skills into the curricular lessons without significant changes in the curricular material itself. Finally, the developmental education approach presupposes a rather radical change in the curricular material that would allow every curricular lesson to be turned into a cognitive lesson.

The concept of learning potential assessment is based on the belief that there is a significant difference between people’s existing ability to solve problems and their ability to learn how to solve problems. To evaluate a person’s learning potential, some form of learning should be included in the assessment procedure. This can be achieved using a test–learn–test format or by including a sequence of helping prompts or cues after each incorrectly solved item. Learning potential assessment procedures can use test materials similar to those of standard cognitive tests, such as sequences of numbers or figures, matrices, and verbal or pictorial analogies. Learning potential assessment can also be carried out with tasks reflecting practically any type of curricular material: language, mathematics, history, science, and so on. Once the idea of learning potential assessment entered the field of the school curriculum, an interesting dialogue started between it and the following, somewhat related assessment approaches in contemporary education: formative assessment, adaptive assessment, and response to intervention.

In Chapter 1, we present an overview of Vygotsky’s cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT), including an explanation of how regulatory processes arise from the routine practices of social life. As part of this overview, we provide an explicit definition of cultural practices. To elaborate how a practice perspective is beneficial for understanding behavioral regulation, we describe how basic elements of an activity theoretic framework capture defining elements of a social practice. This framework offers a useful model for conceptualizing and observing how social practices come into existence and bring/create contextual resources that influence behavioral regulation. These resources are contextually embedded and include such elements as cultural tools, sign systems and symbols, goal-directed activities, and tasks. To better understand how regulatory processes emerge from participation in a community’s valued activities, we offer definitions of self-, other-, and co-regulation from a practice perspective.