Piagetian constructivism and the concept of mediated learning experience

The different tools of learning potential assessment rest on a mediation stage of some learning experience between a pre-test and a post-test. Althouth mediation might correspond to a broad range of educative behaviors, in these tools, as can be seen in this issue, it most often takes the form of quite direct instructions of cognitive strategies or of more general solving principles: As if the subject’s own activity would be totally substituted by the mediation during a mediated learning experience. From a constructivist conception of the development this view of the nature of mediation is indeed too narrow and too restrictive and raises some basic questions: What might be the meaning of a cognitive potential revealed only by direct instruction? How to relate learning potential and cognitive development? How to transform potentialities in subsequent cognitive development. This paper tackles these issues from a discussion of the Feuerstein’s distinction of mediated learning experience versus learning by direct exposure to sources of stimuli. From a constructivist view of cognitive functioning and cognitive development, it tries to broaden what mediation might be in the assessment of learning potential as well as in cognitive education programs.