Constructive Developmental Framework

The constructive developmental framework, abbreviated CDF, is a theoretical framework for the epistemological and psychological assessment of adults. It rests on empirical developmental research showing that a person's perception of reality is an actively constructed world of their own, unique to that person, which continues to develop across their lifespan. The framework was developed by Otto Laske, building on the work of his own teachers at Harvard University, Robert Kegan and Michael Basseches. Its methodology uses three separate instruments that respectively measure a person's social-emotional stage, cognitive level of development and psychological profile, giving three distinct epistemological perspectives on an individual client or a team. These measures are designed to probe how a person or group conceptually constructs the real world, and how closely that person's current thinking approaches the complexity of the world as it actually is. In education, the framework belongs to the same constructive-developmental tradition as andragogy and self-directed learning, offering a way to describe how an adult learner's own capacity to construct meaning keeps developing well past the school years rather than reaching a fixed endpoint in childhood.