Revisiting Piaget and Vigotsky: In Search of a Learning Model for Technology Education

Technology education has always aimed at forming knowledgeable adults, responsible citizens, and capable professionals. Among its central objectives are:

• Familiarizing pupils with the concepts, artifacts, and skills in a given domain of human achievement;
• Enabling pupils, through a cultural approach of that domain, to give it meaning and sense;
• Giving pupils a basis for grounding their future vocational choices and acquisistions; and
• Contributing, through the specific forms of cognitive involvement required by that domain, to the pupils’ general intellectual development.

This article focuses on the last objective of education: cognitive development. Drawing upon Mitcham’s (1978) observation that technology education achieves its objectives via a concern with making and using artifacts, I examine here the relationship between cognition and the use of artifacts in technology education. The idea is to try, from the context of technology education in France, to contribute to a fuller understanding of human-artifact interaction in order to provide more information and further guidance for curriculum design and delivery in technology education.