Abstract
The aim of this chapter is to show how the findings, theories, and methods of cognitive developmental psychology can provide important applications to the problem of academic diagnosis—the understanding and fostering of individual children’s school learning. The thesis is that two branches of cognitive developmental psychology, namely Piaget’s clinical interview method and recent research and theory on the development of mathematical thinking, provide a distinctive view of academic diagnosis, offer a framework for the critique of existing diagnostic techniques, and in some areas provide the substance and methods for new diagnostic approaches. These should be useful not only for the diagnosis of children’s arithmetic, but for the assessment of academic knowledge and cognition in general. Academic diagnosis is one example of how scientific psychology can contribute to the understanding of and to the aid of the individual. At the same time, the new approaches to academic diagnosis suffer from major shortcomings because developmental psychology has failed to deal successfully with key issues of performance, learning, and personality. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how recent experience with cognitive diagnosis sheds light on the strengths and weaknesses of scientific psychology and suggests directions for its future development.
Preparation of this chapter was supported in part by a Public Health Service grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (1 R01 HD16757-01A1).
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Ginsburg, H.P. (1986). Academic Diagnosis. In: Valsiner, J. (eds) The Individual Subject and Scientific Psychology. Perspectives on Individual Differences. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-2239-7_10
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