A Model of Thinking and Learning Over the past three decades, cognitive psychologists and educators have begun to build a model of learning that seems to provide a framework for this analysis. This framework is a relatively recent growth based on the ideas and experimental methods learned from psychologists Jean Piaget, Lev Vygotsky, and the gestalt school of psychology, among others. I refer to this as the constructivist model of cognition and extract four principles that help us understand the kinds of difficulties that take place in a physics class. This construction is an active but in most cases, automatic and unconscious process. Think of language learning by a small child as a prototypical example.
Children create their own grammars from what they hear.
A nice example of the way the brain constructs is seen in Fig. 2. A picture of an animal. Some assembly required. The picture will be immediately obvious to some, more difficult for others. Once you have seen it, it will be hard to remember what it looked like to you when you couldn't see it.