The Process of Decontextualisation in the Formation of the Abstract Concept

In this article the study of the process of construing concepts is theoretically based on the conceptions of the cognitive development associated with Vygotsky and Piaget: the process of acquiring concepts takes place by the assignment of a prototype to a scientifically defined term; the student consciously compares the original properties characterising new information to the core of the concept acquired. He then reconstrues the concept and specifically models it in his own mental world.
Using a sample of secondary school and university students we showed that when they construed psychological concepts there were indeed statistically significant changes in the way the concepts were understood. It was confirmed that the way students con-strue abstract terms depends on the mode of teaching: important changes took place in a seminar with constructively led teaching, but when the transmissive form of teaching was used there were only small or statistically insignificant changes.
In subsequent phases of the research we asked what else (apart from mode of teach-ing) influenced the construing of concepts on the psychology of personality, since this works with categories that immediately relate to the individual student. Logically, personal experience, i.e. context, ought to have an effect on the student‘s understanding of the content of the concept, as it is discussed in the theoretical section of the article in the account of the phases of the process of effective learning.
In the research project we were interested in the connotative significance in psychol-ogy of the relatively well defined concepts of the classic typology of temperament. In our research sample of students we did not find any evidence of a relationship between the values attached to own type of tempera-ment (ascertained from psycho-diagnostic instruments) and their assessment on the part of the students. The evaluation of tem-perament types was in no way influenced by the context of knowledge of personal predominant type of temperament. For our sample of students it may thus be argued that in their understanding of the concepts of the classic typology of temperament the process of decontextualisation of concepts was already complete, at least in the sense of emancipation from the influence of experience of the self.