Activity 3.1 Piaget’s Cognitive Constructivism

Learning occurs within individuals through an active process of intrigue, investigation, reasoning and decision-making, and discovery.  All humans are born without knowledge and begin the process of building their own understanding of the world around them.  Interest spurs individuals to investigation, leading them to explore and experiment to answer self-generated questions.  Considering the outcomes of their investigation, individuals reason and make connections to previously constructed knowledge, categorizing new information and sorting it into knowledge constructions that associate and organize information in schemas that are retrieved and considered when individuals encounter new information.  All individuals are biologically motivated to adapt to their environments and organize their knowledge in order to achieve homeostasis.  When individuals feel unbalanced, out of the natural state of homeostasis, they are intrinsically motivated to investigate, and thus begin the process of meaning-making anew.  Individuals learn in qualitatively different ways and their paths of learning will be unique. Despite this, there are biological constraints that govern individuals’ abilities to make decisions about their discoveries; these are four distinct stages of learning.  The educator as facilitator considers the developmental stage of the students and provides as many opportunities for discovery and exploration as possible.   

I would assume that Piaget would not favor a system of standards-based instruction and summative assessment.  I wonder what he would suggest for assessment.  I also wonder what his suggestions for college and career readiness would be.  How would a prospective employer know that a student was adequately prepared to carry out job duties or even exceed expectations?  What would a transition from such an individualized learning style to the demands of the work place feel like for the student?  It seems that some positions would accommodate this learning style readily, and others would not.  If there was a sweeping and comprehensive movement of social constructivism, how would Piaget suggest the workplace prepare for these students?  Or is the goal, despite individualized discovery learning, for students to emerge from HS or college with roughly the same knowledge base?