ABSTRACT
Carl Bereiter is an educational psychologist whose empirical research and theorizing have ranged over much of the territory of that field and extended beyond it into areas of policy, philosophy and technology. Bereiter and S. Engelmann's Teaching Disadvantaged Children in the Preschool became a Citation Classic, although a sizeable proportion of citations were condemnatory. According to Bereiter the book achieved iconic status, meaning that it was considered permissible to condemn it without reading it. As Bereiter argued in a 1968 article, neither of the theoretical orientations available to childhood educators – Skinnerian behaviourism and Piagetian developmentalism – made contact with fundamental questions of what to teach and how. He attached greater hope to a theoretical approach that was only beginning to appear on the educational horizon, what came to be known as cognitivism. Over an eight-year period, beginning in 1976, Bereiter and Marlene Scardamalia carried out scores of experiments, investigating almost full range of cognitive issues surrounding the composing process.
