ABSTRACT
Long before the Cambridge and Woods Hole Conferences articulated the need for teaching mathematical structures in meaningful ways, another group of psychologists in Europe was developing a theory that also pointed to the importance of understanding structure for problem solving and thinking in general. These were the gestalt psychologists. Although during the first half of this century a few psychologists such as Brownell were concerned with meaningful conceptual learning, most American psychologists of the time were still largely involved in accounting for the formation of simple associations. Thorndike acknowledged the necessity for more complex organizations of bonds to account for problem solving and understanding, but his experiments remained focused upon the basic connections of which, he thought, all knowledge consisted. Imported from Europe in the 1920s, gestalt psychology set forth a fundamentally different approach to learning, citing experimental data that the associationist theories could not readily explain. Gestalt theory influenced portions of American psychology for years afterward and today is receiving renewed attention in analyses of problem solving.
