A Constructivist Pedagogy For Career And Technology Education

14 Pages 3523 Words

finds valuable or important to their perception of reality. In other words, the subject will use new knowledge in a way that is useful to them, based on their cognitive constructs. Furthermore, our understanding of reality will be different from other’s understandings, since we all base our own realities of the world upon our own individual cognitive constructs and personal experiences.

One might ask how this new knowledge becomes a part of the subject’s cognitive construct. Radical constructivists base their theory of knowledge construction on Piaget’s theory of cognitive development (von Glasersfeld, 1995). Radical constructivism holds that individual subjects organize their experiences in schemes. When a subject lacks any mental confusion, they are in a state of equilibrium—their schemes are satisfied. When the subject encounters a new event or experience, one of two things happen.

One, the subject already will have schemes in place that explain the new event. In this case assimilation, or taking in the new knowled...