Explore the World of Constructivist Psychology

Psychological School of Thought Summary

• Constructivism in psychology refers to diverse schools of thought with a shared critique of previous approaches and assumptions about the active constructive nature of human knowledge.
• Constructivism is an epistemological premise grounded on the assertion that the human mind actively gives meaning and order to reality.
• Constructivist psychology investigates how human beings create systems for meaningfully understanding their worlds and experiences.
• In psychotherapy, constructivism could translate into a therapist asking questions that confront a client's worldview to expand their meaning-making habits.
• Jean Piaget's theory in constructivist psychology describes how children develop and learn in an ongoing process and interchange between individuals and their surroundings, through which individuals develop increasingly complex schemas.
• Personal construct theory, by George Kelly, is concerned primarily with the epistemic role of the observer in interpreting reality.
• Post-rationalist cognitive therapy, by Vittorio Guidano, hypothesized that the mind creates a complex system of abstract rules responsible for the concrete and particular qualities of our conscious experience.
• Constructivist psychology in education emphasizes that students are always engaged in a process of actively constructing meaning.
• The teacher can only facilitate or thwart the process of constructing meaning, but not invent it.
• Constructivism in education makes students, teachers, the environment and anyone or anything else in which the student has interaction active participants in their learning.
• Constructivism in education is an approach that emphasizes the importance of the learner's active involvement in the learning process, rather than the passive reception of information.
• Constructivist psychology in education argues that the teacher should be a facilitator, not an instructor.