A new approach for patient education: beyond constructivism.

Over the last ten years, research developed in science education, especially at the University of Geneva, has demonstrated that education must be centered on interactions between the learner's conceptions and a systemic educational environment. Transposed to a medical knowledge, this new model, originally conceived by the authors and called the 'allosteric learning model', offers new ways of considering patient education. After criticizing the 'grand theories' of learning, mainly the latest ones called constructivist models, the authors suggest a new set of micromodels designed to explain thoroughly the functioning of the patient's thought process (questions, frame of references, semantic network,...) and his understanding of medical information on his own disease. For health care providers, these models also offer a series of new pedagogical approaches both efficient and original to regulate the act of education based on confrontation, mobilisation, integration, etc.