Publication 4532

This paper highlights the educative consequences of contemporary constructivist perspective. Firstly, relationships between epistemology, psychology of knowledge and didactics are reviewed, and a relative autonomy of epistemological study is asserted. Second, the mail theses of radical constructivism are critically presented, and a constructivist perspective founded in Piaget’s work is discussed. Third, the adequacy of both perspectives in front of the educative challenge is evaluated: specifically, how to explain the child’s elaboration of knowledge in a didactical context; particularly, how disciplinary knowledge is included in the constructive process. As a conclusion, this discussion shows that Piagetian constructivism is compatible with the individual construction of knowledge inside didactical situations; by the contrary, radical constructivism has many insolvable difficulties in this regard.