Derry responds to Mayer's 1992 article asserting that educational psychology is poised to regain its dominance as the guiding science of education. Derry disagrees with Mayer in two major areas. First, Mayer believes there is an emergence of a unified theoretical cognitive perspective in the form of the knowledge construction metaphor. Derry takes the position that Mayer's cognitive paradigm is being challenged by movements in diverse education research communities. Second, Mayer sees educational psychology overcoming the irrelevance of studying tasks in unrealistic laboratory settings. Derry disagrees because the overall relevance of typical school activities and the concept of formal schooling both are being strongly challenged by the research. In response to the issue of irrelevance, Derry discusses situated cognition, where cognition has to be viewed as a part of a physical, social, and cultural context.

Derry argues that Mayer's knowledge construction metaphor is claimed by a number of distinct research camps. Specific research areas discussed in the article are Cognitive Constructivism in Prose Research, Cognitive Symbolic Processing, and Radical Constructivism. These research camps illustrate the evolutionary development of cognitive research. Cognitive Constructivism was prominent in the late 1970's to the early 1980's. Cognitive Symbolic Processing was the focus of the 1980's. Radical Constructivism came to dominate cognitive research in the 1990's. Derry tells us that a comparison of these research areas shows, "there are different cognitive educational psychologies, each associated with a different view of knowledge construction, and members of the educational psychology research community identify in different degrees with all of these perspectives." (p. 416)

Regarding the issue of relevance in education, Derry discusses the idea of cultural contextualization. She tells us that, "cognition must be viewed as an integral part of the physical, social, and cultural contexts to which it belongs." (p.416) From this position, Derry discusses the ideas of communities of practice, knowledge and learning, apprenticeship, identity and self concept, identities of nonparticipation, and boundary objects and practice. Derry associates these ideas to a cultural theory of situated cognition.

This article illustrates the point that a unified theoretical cognitive perspective cannot be readily identified. The divergent cognitive perspectives being studied by the research community show a rich diversity of theory and exploration in the field of educational psychology. The article shows that the research is evolutionary and iterative, with theories being developed and examined, selectively filtered, and then reworked into new theories to be tested further.