ABSTRACT
AS THIS BOOK is being written, educational psychology has come to rest on a cognitive framework for human learning that is more theoretically open and less disciplinarily pure than it has been for most of this century. Ironically, the speculative, commonsensical, and uncodified study of mind associated with Aristotle and Kant-the baseline from which the fledgling discipline of psychology sought to distance itself-has come full circle, even though our contemporary constructivist metatheory approaches traditionally speculative questions from a grounding in social science. In educational theory especially, a new generation of constructivists has made inroads that cannot be easily dismissed. Bagley and Hunter (1992), for instance, identify constructivism as the third pillar of the educational reform in the United States alongside school restructuring and the integration of technology. Constructivism neatly complements and extends the mandate for authenticity arising from progressivism, and it is precisely on points such as the importance of authenticity to learning that we see the convergence of mainstream philosophies of education and educational psychology. While Dewey is not best known for his psychology, nor Bartlett and Piaget for their educational theories, they join Vygotsky (who is known for both) in providing a fairly smooth conceptual bridge between scientific work on cognition and theories of how educational practices should be structured to accommodate learners’ constructive processes.
