On Describing a Student's Cognitive Structure

Abstract

For several decades, a model has been developing which depicts the learning process in terms of interaction between a student's cognitive structure and the structure of the discipline being studied. There arc a number of conceptual difficulties here that are trapping researchers in cognitive psychology, especially the problem of not confounding the two types of structure. Doubts can even be raised about the usefulness of the notion of cognitive structure as it is presently developed. Throughout the paper, insights from recent relevant philosophical work are used to throw light on the empirical research that is being carried out.