Cognitive conflict and learning

Piaget used the term disequilibration to describe the process of an individual's encountering a new experience that generates a contradiction with the individual's existing cognitive structures (see for example Piaget, 1977), and argued that cognitive development or learning occurs as the individual attempts to resolve this cognitive conflict, a process he referred to as accommodation. He proposed three possible types of accommodation: the individual might ignore the contradiction; the individual might hold two theories simultaneously, dealing with the contradiction by applying one theory in some specific cases, and the other in others; or the individual might construct a new, more encompassing notion that explains and resolves the prior contradiction. Achieving this last type of accommodation, that is learning, is the purpose of teaching and of educational software design in the present context.

Some other writers, a leader among whom is Seymour Papert, regard the issue of cognitive conflict with a somewhat different emphasis from that in the body of work just described. Papert considers cognitive conflict to be part of the vital process of theory building in learning. He assigns rather less importance to the efficient achievement of 'correct' concepts, valuing the unorthodox theories and explanations developed by learners. He emphasizes the importance for learning of this process of building and modification of theories.

Papert argues that the unorthodox theories of young children are not deficiencies or cognitive gaps, but that they serve as a way of flexing cognitive muscles, or developing and working through the necessary skills needed for more orthodox theorizing. He asserts that educators distort Piaget's message by seeing his contribution as revealing that children hold false beliefs, which they, the educators, must overcome (Papert, 1980). This leads to the development of learning environments that use cognitive conflict somewhat less directly than implied by the science education work outlined earlier. It suggests the creation of open-ended learning environments in which students might explore concepts and ideas, developing (possibly 'wrong' or transitional) theories and testing these. Papert uses the word microworlds to describe such learning environments.

Microworlds (Papert, 1980; Squires and McDougall, 1986) are self-contained environments, simple restricted worlds 'in which certain questions are relevant and others are not' (Papert, 1980: 117). Learners explore the properties of a chosen microworld in a completely open-ended fashion, developing and testing theories about the environment as they do so. Papert advocates the construction of many such microworlds, each with its own set of assumptions and constraints; a microworld designer can lead a learner to new understandings by careful control of these assumptions and constraints. In later work (see for example Harel and Papert, 1991; Harel, 1991) Papert and his colleagues advocate the construction by learners of microworlds of their own; however, this paper is concerned only with the development for teaching purposes of environments designed specifically to promote cognitive conflict in learners.

Andrea diSessa, who worked for some years with Papert, assigns even greater importance to learners' pre-existing cognitive structures. He discusses these in terms of intuitive knowledge, referring to the many fragmentary small structures that a learner gleans from experience in the world as phenomenological primitives or p-prims (diSessa, 2000). DiSessa describes cognitive conflict in the following way. People have hundreds if not thousands of p-prims, and when they make a judgement of reasonableness or unreasonableness they are frequently summoning all the relevant p-prims and deciding which one, or which collection of a few, best matches the situation. Then what happens in the situation is reasonable if it matches the chosen p-prim or p-prims and surprising if it does not. Like Papert, diSessa is critical of what he sees as educators' under-valuing of learners' intuitive knowledge, arguing that learners are adjusting their p-prims to new experiences all the time and that it is not difficult to make small changes of this kind.