Glossary
Key concepts of Organic Constructivism
39 terms drawn from the 2018 book, grouped by topic and linked to detailed explanations.
Epistemology
- Organic ConstructivismCO
- A coherent semiotic system of arguments and epistemological positions about knowledge, organised into dichotomous statements, combining constructivism with an organic model. Explore →
- Constructivism
- Knowledge arises through subject-object interaction, balancing experience and reason. Every cognitive structure has a developmental history. Explore →
- Organicism
- Reality understood as a self-regulating organism whose whole exceeds its parts; cognitive constructions emerge through equilibration. Explore →
- Mechanism
- The machine metaphor assumes detachable parts, additive wholes and linear causes: useful for clocks, limiting for cognition. Explore →
- Mechanistic constructivism
- Approaches claiming constructivism while assuming direct knowledge-reality correspondences or machine analogies, unlike Organic Constructivism. Explore →
- Trivial constructivism
- The bare assertion that learners construct knowledge, without specifying the differing epistemological commitments of constructivist approaches. Explore →
- Known object and real objectOC / OR
- The known object (OC) is internally constructed; the real object (OR) is external and cannot be directly compared. Truth-as-copy gives way to adaptive usefulness and adequacy. Explore →
- System of dichotomous statementsSaD
- Opposing more and less adequate statements along empiricism–constructivism and mechanism–organicism axes, with general (SaD-CO), learner (SaD-VdA) and science (SaD-VdC) systems. Explore →
- Views of learners and scienceVdA / VdC
- More or less adequate beliefs about individual learning (VdA) and science (VdC), used in epistemological questionnaires, including teacher education. Explore →
Meaning and knowledge
- Signifier
- Anything reaching the senses—words, drawings, objects, images and symbols—and internal ideas or memories requiring meaning. A signifier arrives without meaning. Explore →
- Meaning
- What a signifier makes subjects feel or understand, constructed internally through biological, emotional and cognitive resources, with personal and socially regulated dimensions. Explore →
- Information and knowledge
- Information is knowledge’s external record in signifiers. It becomes knowledge only when someone knows the code and has the prior resources to interpret it. Only information circulates between people. Explore →
- Subject–environment membrane
- Like skin, it separates subject and environment while allowing interaction, admitting signifiers but not their meanings. Explore →
- The declarative version of science
- Scientific texts, formulas and concepts stripped of original problems, inquiry and authors’ understanding, as often encountered in textbooks. Explore →
Cognitive organisation
- Knowledge schema
- The basic cognitive unit, accumulating and adaptively regulating subject-environment interaction. It enables meaning, prediction, inference and transformation, with a neural-synaptic basis. Explore →
- Specific schemasEe
- First-level, implicit procedural schemas formed through empirical interaction in physical-inert (Eef), emotional (Eee) and intentional (Eei) domains. Explore →
- General schemasEg
- Second-level schemas built through prolonged reflection on first-level activity: operational (Ego), sentimental (Egs) and grammatical (Egg). Explore →
- Operational schemasEgo
- Reversible mental actions on representations, unlike physical actions, built through reflective abstraction on repeated schema regulation. Explore →
- Figurative thinking toolsHf
- Words, signs, symbols and mental images. Unlike schemas, they cannot transform or anticipate, but enable declarative expression, awareness and semiotic reflection. Explore →
- Central processorPc
- Coordinates schemas and figurative tools sequentially or in parallel, covering executive functions associated with prefrontal cortex. Explore →
- Sensorimotor and semiotic interactionIe / Is
- Two external information sources: raw direct experience (Ie) and culturally shared signs and symbols (Is). Explore →
Learning processes
- Equilibration
- Self-regulation compensates for disturbances and reaches new equilibria, creating knowledge. The persistent cognition-reality gap continually generates further imbalances. Explore →
- Assimilation and accommodation
- Assimilation interprets information so it can nourish a schema; accommodation restructures the schema to integrate it, like a drop of water in water rather than oil. Explore →
- Memorising, understanding and integrating
- Memorising retains signs without meaning. Understanding assimilates through existing schemas without accommodation. Integrating combines assimilation and accommodation, enriching action; understanding alone does not ensure retention. Explore →
- Making explicit, operating and formalising
- Internal constructions: making schemas consciously expressible; reflecting on regulation to build operations; and reflecting on explicit content to construct abstract concepts. Explore →
- Reflective abstraction
- Reconstructs repeated lower-level regulation at a higher level, depending on specific schemas, productive conflict, reflection time and personal interest. Explore →
- Awareness
- Schemas gradually become conscious, from goals and outcomes towards the means used. Social feedback accelerates this transition from knowing how to explaining. Explore →
- Representational redescription
- Implicit content is reconstructed at a more refined level through shared social signifiers, remaining coordinated with its original implicit basis. Explore →
- Metacognition
- Conscious reflection on cognition through ongoing self-regulation. Making explicit, operating and formalising all involve it. Explore →
Teaching
- Student as Learner and Student as ScientistAcA / AcC
- AcC derives teaching from scientific knowledge-building; AcA derives teaching guidelines from how students construct their own knowledge. Explore →
- Recontextualise
- Give content meaning through practical and empirical contexts, varying context (Vc), difficulty (Vd) and relevant or irrelevant factors (Vr, Vi). Explore →
- Develop new meanings
- Encourage reflection through intensive semiotic interaction: discussions within and between groups, representations and reasoned argument, complementing sensorimotor recontextualisation. Explore →
- Cognitive conflict
- A disturbance can lead to new construction when learners engage cognitively and emotionally. Disinterest, denial, irrelevance or excessive novelty prevent productive conflict. Explore →
- Intension and extension of a concept
- Intension is a concept’s defining attributes; extension is its set of objects. Engaging with extension integrates meaning and develops application procedures. Explore →
- Guided discovery teaching
- An equilibration-based sequence: begin with effortful problems and introduce meaningful information for solutions only later. Explore →