ABSTRACT
The comparison of any current development journal with one from even 5 years past shows a striking contrast. For about 15 to 20 years the field was dominated by a structuralist orientation, principally through Piaget's theory; not so today. In this essay, I examine the alternative to the structuralist point of view that increasingly contends with Piaget's theory as the dominant explanatory model for cognitive development. Beyond detailing the nature of this orientation, I suggest that the new functionalism, or neofunctionalism as I refer to this metatheoretical orientation, will in due course suffer the same fate as older functionalism, losing its credibility as an explanatory model and its utility as a method for conducting research, if the virtues of a structuralist analysis are ignored.
