Intellectual Factors

For Piaget, all learning derives from mental relations of abstraction and balance. In other words, the human being is constantly seeking the improvement of his higher reasoning capabilities. Thus, using mechanisms of assimilation, adjusting and adaptation, people learn through their mistakes and victories, analyzing them through mental operations and grouping relations. This process is what Piaget calls balancing mechanism.

It can also be included in the intellectual factors, the operations, the relations, the groupings, the construction of schemes and the structuring, all according to Piaget. In fact, such mental manipulations derive from the representation of reality that each one has. For Piaget, intelligence is constructed in continuous form, through processes of mental abstraction resulting from the relations between the individual and the object. These relations happen, in a higher form, as abstract operations that perceive reality associating mental structures and creating projects of assimilation of reality. That is where the denomination of intellectual factors comes from: its effectiveness depends on the logical-mathematical mental coordination, influenced by all the other factors, such as perception, emotion and motivation.

The importance of intellectual factors is as essential to determine the quality of learning as all other factors. Some educators tend to place too much emphasis in the intellectual aspects, forgetting, however, that these same factors depend upon a series of external circumstances (Antunes, 1998; Gardner, 1995). In other words, it is important to think, but the world is not only made of thoughts.

Learning, therefore, depends on a conjunction of dual factors, involving physical (sensorial and intellectual) and sensational (motivational and emotional) aspects, with complex relations between themselves and the external environment:

Figure 3: The interaction of factors in learning spaces

Figure 3 considers the existence of two learning spaces: one that is internalized, where emotional and intellectual factors act more effectively; and a more general space, that allows more complex interactions between the individual and the environment, mediated by the motivational and sensorial factors. According to this reasoning, there is no learning without all the factors being involved, in greater or smaller degree, in the creation of knowledge (Greenspan, 1999).