3380

Elizabeth Scott-Janda

philosophy of mathematics education

2016

30

Dialectical Thinking , Piaget , Postformal Thinking , Relativistic Thinking , Metasys-tematic Thinking, Theory

Piaget’s theory and ideas open the doors for the education community in general, mathe-matics educators in particular, to understand individual cognition and explore the ways of investigating it. This has helped us to develop our understanding of how individuals might think. More recent research suggests that individual cognitive development can continue throughout adulthood, expanding on Piaget’s theory and ideas. Scholars who investigate this development describe a form of thinking that goes beyond formal operations as postformal thinking. In this discussion paper, we use three constructs from postformal thinking frameworks to describe what postformal thinking is and what its implications might be if it is applied in mathematics education.