Dr. Mogens Reimer Jensen's passion is to work with children within the context of their family, school, community, and culture.
ROSWELL, GA, August 22, 2019 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Marquis Who's Who, the world's premier publisher of biographical profiles, is proud to present Mogens Reimer Jensen, PhD, with the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award. An accomplished listee, Dr. Jensen celebrates many years' experience in his professional network, and has been noted for achievements, leadership qualities, and the credentials and successes he has accrued in his field. As in all Marquis Who's Who biographical volumes, individuals profiled are selected on the basis of current reference value. Factors such as position, noteworthy accomplishments, visibility, and prominence in a field are all taken into account during the selection process.
Dr. Jensen is a citizen of Denmark, where he was born, Israel, and the United States. With more than 40 years of professional excellence in psychology and education, Dr. Jensen works as the chairman and chief executive officer of Cognitive Education Systems and director of the International Center for Cognition and Learning in Roswell, Georgia. Since 1989, as a licensed psychologist, Dr. Jensen has provided diagnostic and therapy services working with children and parents facing a wide range of developmental, cognitive, social, emotional, behavioral, and learning needs.
Dr. Jensen's passion is to work with children within the context of their family, school, community, and culture. Drawing on a developmental perspective, he is curious about the social, emotional, language and cognitive processes children use to acquire bodies of knowledge and achieve proficiency with their use. He examines the roles played by interactions with parents, caregivers, and educators in the formation of children's cognitive competence and learning ability. He studies how cognitive competence contributes to the development of the sense of identity and self that enable children to emerge as adults with the ability to adjust and thrive in the face of changes and discontinuities in their lives.
Interest in these intersections crystallized when, growing up in Copenhagen, Dr. Jensen served in the Association of Danish High School Students (DGS) with a portfolio to promote understanding of the surrounding world. From this position, and under the overall leadership of the association, he launched and organized the first Danish Operation Day's Work [Operation Dagsværk] in 1969. In this national initiative, high school students adopted a ready-to-launch, but unfunded UNESCO Functional Literacy project developed for a region of Zambia with a combined emphasis on literacy, education, and local economic development. The Danish students engaged this project through knowledge about its purposes and goals and by pooling the earnings from their labor for a day to fund the construction of schools, develop dialect-centered curricula, deliver knowledge over a wide region via radio, provide local facilitation, and by ensuring cross-pollination of best practices between the roughly 100 project sites. (Operation Day's Work went on to become a recurring mission for Danish high school students).
Shortly after completing the 1969 Day's Work drive, Dr. Jensen travelled to Israel, where he continued to pursue his interest in culture, cognition, learning, adaptation and change. His own responses to the unfamiliar country and language represented an informal yet fertile case study. Located near Tiv'on between Haifa and Nazareth, Kibbutz Shaar Haamakim offered a welcoming setting and launch pad for Dr. Jensen to begin to acquire Hebrew and learn about Israeli society and culture. Within two years, he was pursuing studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem with a dual major in psychology and philosophy. Within another year he started working at the Hadassah WIZO Canada Research Institute (since renamed the Feuerstein Institute) as a member of a research and development team that examined Reuven Feuerstein's concepts of mediated learning experience (MLE) and structural cognitive modifiability (SCM). Both concepts have continued to find expression in Dr. Jensen's work.
Focusing on qualitative characteristics of the adult-child relationship, the concept of MLE provides a foundation for innovative learning-centered solutions that promote children's cognitive development through the parenting they receive at home and the education they receive at school. Together with the concept of SCM, the ability to mediate learning experiences provides a theoretical foundation and a practical approach to engage all children, including learners with special needs, to nourish their ability to learn, grow, and change. Dr. Jensen became a senior research associate at the Feuerstein Institute and for a decade made contributions there to the scientific development of the intersection between the cognitive and learning sciences.
Prior to coming to Yale University in 1978 for doctoral studies in clinical and health psychology, Dr. Jensen's thinking and research benefited from interactions with scholars, and visiting scholars, in Israel. At Hebrew University, he joined a small discussion group co-led by cognitive and mathematical psychologist Amos Tversky, who studied cognitive biases and illusions, and philosopher Avishai Margalit, from whom Dr. Jensen also learned as a student in the department of philosophy. Both before and after Dr. Jensen came to Yale University, Edward F. Zigler, a champion of the youngest children who helped design the Head Start program in the United States, took an interest in his work. At Yale, Dr. Jensen studied with Zigler in the Bush Foundation Program in Child Development and Social Policy (since renamed the Zigler Center). Albert J. Solnit learned about Dr. Jensen's interests in children's cognition and learning while on sabbatical in Israel. Dr. Jensen later learned from him about the importance of recognizing children's psychological needs in child custody cases, when he completed his pre-doctoral clinical psychology internship at Yale's Child Study Center, which Solnit directed. Jerome L. Singer, who directed Yale's clinical and health psychology program, and who sometimes is identified as the father of daydreaming for his early studies in this area, became Dr. Jensen's doctoral research advisor and also a lifelong friend. Drawing on Gary E. Schwartz's disregulation theory, Dr. Jensen's doctoral research examined psycho-biological factors in health and illness. The study was published in a special issue on health edited by Jerry Suls in the Journal of Personality in 1987.
Both before and after completing his doctoral degree at Yale, Dr. Jensen was following work on the emerging knowledge economy and its impact on individuals and communities. Already in 1983, the US National Commission on Excellence in Education had published its landmark report, "A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform." The concerns about adaptation to change that had informed a regional project in Zambia just 20 years earlier had, by the late 1980'ies, become paramount for the successful adaptation of individuals and communities everywhere.
In response to this reality, Dr. Jensen worked to formulate and test a comprehensive theory to guide program development to enable parents, educators and policy makers to promote children's ability to adapt to evolving bodies of knowledge and think for a living. Throughout the 1990'ies, he integrated advances from the cognitive, neuropsychological, and learning sciences into this framework. With recognition of its most important conceptual precursors, and especially the concept of MLE, Dr. Jensen named the resulting framework the theory of mediated constructivism. He registered the word MindLadder® to secure a recognizable shorthand to identify this project and its applied programs.
MindLadder programs are designed so educators and school leaders can access dimensions from the cognitive and learning sciences to lend impetus to their visions for the students they serve. Much like scissors need two legs to cut, MindLadder programs focus jointly on cognitive process development and subject area knowledge acquisition. Placed in the hands of the initiated adult mediator of children's learning experiences, the objective is to develop the neuroplasticity or 'structural cognitive modifiability' students need to learn, change, and grow in the face of evolving bodies of knowledge and discontinuities in the world around them.
While continually undergoing theoretical refinement in response to research, now by scholars around the world, the core concept of MLE and its qualitative characteristics remain central in MindLadder programs: Drawing on their unique heritage and culture, parents nourish their children's knowledge construction functions ('KCF') within a context of meaning created by daily life events. Parents foster their children's sense of identity and belonging while promoting their cognitive ability to acquire knowledge and achieve proficiency with its use in new and initially unfamiliar areas. In school, teachers mediate the development of their students' knowledge construction functions using the best available academic curriculum to prepare them for the changing world they live in. School psychologists and clinicians use specially prepared MindLadder tools to examine more closely how students, including those with special learning needs, acquire subject area knowledge and learn how to learn. Scalable internet-accessed server-based technology enables administrators in schools and districts of any size to lead by their purpose (preparing students for the knowledge economy) and manage by their results.
Dr. Jensen's MindLadder does not replace the academic curriculum, or the mandated state standards, or the adopted methods of assessing academic performance. All of these must continue to evolve and be implemented as warranted by best practices. Dr. Jensen's work focuses on cognition, content knowledge, behavior, and experience in the nexus where learning occurs. Alongside the inclusion of the full range of learning goals, mediated constructivism theory emphasizes the development of students' ability to transition from novice to proficient up the mind's ladder to master new bodies of knowledge and skill. Likewise, the theory emphasizes the ability to leave behind bodies of knowledge that have become inert and, in a very real sense, go down the mind's ladder in the interest of acquiring new knowledge and skills in emerging new domains.
Dr. Jensen's work on the research and development of mediated constructivism theory was undertaken at what today is Cognitive Education Systems (CES) and the International Center for Cognition and Learning (ICCL) in Roswell, Georgia. In 1987, generous support from Steve and Alice Bostic in Atlanta enabled Dr. Jensen to cofound CES with his wife, Dr. Myltreda L. Jensen, psychologist and speech-language pathologist, who collaborated with him on the development of the applied MindLadder programs and is first author of the MindLadder Parent-as-Mediator program. By the end of the 1990'ies a grant from Henry (Hank) McCamish, Jr., administered by Reinhardt University in Waleska, Georgia, allowed for a controlled, longitudinal research project to be completed on the MindLadder classroom program. With control for pre-existing differences, the study identified significant and sizable differences between MindLadder students and non-MindLadder controls in academic achievement and reasoning in upper elementary school students. Additionally, MindLadder students qualifying for special services did much better than did such students in the non-MindLadder control group. At the end of the study, students qualifying for special services in the MindLadder group did not differ in overall academic achievement from non-qualifying students in the control group. The philosophy and theory of mediated constructivism and the results of this study appear in an issue on cognitive education guest edited by Joan Figg and Julian Elliott and published by Educational and Child Psychology in 2003.
Over the course of his career, Dr. Jensen gained valuable expertise in varying roles at Yale University, Delphi Health and Science, Walden University, and Focus Forward Counseling and Consulting. He introduced many psychologists and educators to the theories and concepts of structural cognitive modifiability, mediated leaning experience, and knowledge construction functions. He engaged many parents in the roles they can fill using their cultural heritage and daily life experiences to promote their children's sense of identity along with their ability to think, grow and change. Dr. Jensen has presented his work at numerous professional conferences and distinguished universities among them Yale, Harvard, Columbia's Teachers College, San Diego State University, and Singapore's National Institute of Education. He has interacted with colleagues who went on to advance and add to the ideas he shared through their own research and teachings, including Asa G. Hilliard III, Larry Emerson, and Alice Seng-Seok Hoon, among many others. Even though his career has been filled with highlights, Dr. Jensen feels a special gratitude for the opportunity and privilege to work with and learn from the children and parents in his care.
A member of the American Psychological Association, Dr. Jensen holds a Bachelor of Arts and a Master of Arts from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel and a Doctor of Philosophy from Yale University. Drawing on his theoretical developments and empirical research he authored "The Mind's Ladder: Empowering Students in the Knowledge Economy." Dr. Jensen developed the MindLadder family of programs for child, family, school and community development. He examined the role of change models in school psychology and education, and he has conducted research into the role of psychobiological factors in health and illness.
In light of his outstanding work, Dr. Jensen received a fellowship through Yale University, a scholarship through the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and features in publications such as Who's Who in the World. Looking ahead, Dr. Jensen focuses on developing the next generation of programs and resources for families, schools and communities to prepare children to work and live in a cyber-driven, globalized knowledge economy that increasingly intersects with AI, machine learning, and new abilities to influence deeply people's perception of the reality they experience. Dr. Jensen's work addresses the need to empower each individual with awareness and critical analytical ability to discern how knowledge is acquired, how beliefs are formed, how skills are developed, and how steps can be taken to curate knowledge and cross-validate its reliability and validity. Dr. Jensen's focus on developing and maintaining our sense of identity, agency, and self as we continue to grow and change in a fast-moving world continues to maintain its significance for individuals and communities alike.
In recognition of outstanding contributions to his profession and the Marquis Who's Who community, Mogens Reimer Jensen, PhD, has been featured on the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement website. Please visit www.ltachievers.com for more information about this honor.
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