Abstract
The different tools of learning potential assessment rest on a mediation stage of some learning experience between a pre-test and a post-test. Althouth mediation might correspond to a broad range of educative behaviors, in these tools, as can be seen in this issue, it most often takes the form of quite direct instructions of cognitive strategies or of more general solving principles: As if the subject’s own activity would be totally substituted by the mediation during a mediated learning experience. From a constructivist conception of the development this view of the nature of mediation is indeed too narrow and too restrictive and raises some basic questions: What might be the meaning of a cognitive potential revealed only by direct instruction? How to relate learning potential and cognitive development? How to transform potentialities in subsequent cognitive development. This paper tackles these issues from a discussion of the Feuerstein’s distinction of mediated learning experience versus learning by direct exposure to sources of stimuli. From a constructivist view of cognitive functioning and cognitive development, it tries to broaden what mediation might be in the assessment of learning potential as well as in cognitive education programs.
Résumé
Les différents instruments d’évaluation du potentiel d’apprentissage sont fondés sur une étape de médiation d’un apprentissage qui prend place entre un pré-test et un post-test. Bien que l’activité médiatrice puisse renvoyer à une grande variété d’aides cognitives, elle est, dans les instruments d’évaluation du potentiel d’apprentissage, généralement opérationnalisée sous la forme d’une instruction très directe de stratégies cognitives ou de principes de résolution plus généraux (voir ce numéro spécial). Dans ces interventions l’activité médiatrice a en effet une forte tendance a éclipser l’activité propre du sujet au cours de l’apprentissage. D’un point de vue constructiviste, cette conception de la médiation paraît bien évidemment trop étroite et trop restrictive et soulève une série de problèmes: signification de potentiels essentiellement révélés au moyen d’une instruction directe; relations entre potentiel d’apprentissage et développement cognitif; la transformation des potentiels en acquis cognitifs ultérieurs. Cet article aborde ces différentes questions à partir d’une discussion de la distinction opérée par Feuerstein entre expérience d’apprentissage médiatisée et apprentisage par confrontation directe avec les situations. Il défend l’idée que l’activité médiatrice au cours de l’évaluation du potentiel d’apprentissage comme dans les programmes d’éducation cognitive peut être largement enrichie par des principes d’intervention inspirés par un point de vue constructiviste.
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This text is an expanded version of a paper delivered at the Second International Conference on Mediated Learning Experience, Knoxville, Tenessee (USA), August 6–8, 1989. I Acknowledge with gratitude the support given to me by the University of Québec at Hull, where I have been a visiting professor from 1988 to 1990. I am grateful to Carl Haywood for the translation of this paper.
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Paour, J.L. Piagetian constructivism and the concept of mediated learning experience. Eur J Psychol Educ 5, 177–190 (1990). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03172681
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03172681