Cognitive development and language learning are in part natural processes, mostly involving underlying biological faculty like brain development or neural plasticity in the brain. Humans are naturally predisposed to language learning, as seen in infants' face preference or naturalness of learning certain structures of language. However, to obtain natural faculties to the fullest extent they require rich social and environmental interactions. In other words, learning is simultaneously biologically instituted and socially constructed.

Constructivism, especially the component of Piaget's scaffolding concept, is a helpful lens to consider learning as active and constructive. Scaffolding involves the provision of a support structure to help students learn. The support that scaffolding affords often challenges the learner at a level just beyond what they can do independently. Cognitive development occurs through the interaction and practice afforded by scaffolding. Scaffolding highlights social and cognitive factors related to development and elaborates how knowledge is constructed and reconstructed internally based on interactions with one's environment. Constructivism may focus a little too heavily on fixed developmental stages or an individual’s mind and miss the larger social and cultural conditions that shape learning.

Neuroscience offers important insights into cognition and learning processes. Current brain studies show that learning entails dynamic neural processes, including synaptic plasticity and functional networks formed through experiences and input from the environment. This evidence is consistent with a constructivist perspective about the process of learning as a slow phenomenon that is biologically embedded into the knower(s). Neuroscience could advance ideas around learning but is limited in terms of fully capturing learning in complicated social ways. Neuroscience is also often impaired in directly translating what is learned in the lab to classroom practice, and there is a possibility that these insights will lead to oversimplified or misapplied neuroscience assuming, or missing, psychological factors and/or social aspects.

Overall, integrating insights from natural cognitive capacities, constructivist educational theory, and neuroscience provides a richer, multidimensional understanding of learning. It recognizes that learning is grounded in biological development but fundamentally shaped through active construction of knowledge via interaction with social and environmental contexts.

References:

Arsalidou, M., & Pascual-Leone, J. (2016). Constructivist developmental theory is needed in developmental neuroscience. NPJ science of learning, 1, 16016. https://doi.org/10.1038/npjscilearn.2016.16

Cherry, K. (2025, June 3). Piaget's theory and stages of cognitive development. Simply Psychology. https://www.simplypsychology.org/piaget.html