"Meaning is not given to us in our encounters, but it is given by us, constructed by us, each in our own way, according to how our understanding is currently organized" (p. 112).Psychologists and educators are embracing a new view of learning that rejects reductionist theories of the past.
According to Resnick (1987), "We are in the midst of a major convergence of psychological theories . . . today, cognitive scientists generally share the assumption that knowledge is constructed by learners" (p. 19).
Central Principles: In theory, constructivism in education means that teachers embrace a holistic way of thinking about the nature of learning, quite apart from the methodology of direct instruction, which some call instructivism. Rather than viewing learning as decontextualized, in constructivism it is assumed that learning occurs in whole experiences. Constructivism holds that knowledge does not have a separate existence from the physical nervous system; it cannot exist in some complete form outside the learner and be internalized, stored, and reproduced at some later time.
Information processing theories (e.g. Neisser, 1967; Rumelhart, 1980) and behaviorism have formed the bedrock of popular educational theory, and they justify the process-product curriculum for direct instruction. To behaviorists and information processing theorists, learning is essentially a matter of storing information for later recall. The typical school curriculum is based on a structure where important knowledge is identified for the student to acquire, often expressed in the form of task analyses and behavioral objectives. Within this framework, teachers impart such knowledge by breaking it down (simplification) into manageable pieces for easy internalization by students.
Alternatives to behavioral and IP models have existed for a long time beginning with the works of functionalists such as Dewey (1896), Angell (1904), and Bartlett (1932). The functionalists:
In the typical classroom the predominant teaching model is direct instruction, which some call objectivism and others call, sometimes disparagingly, instructivism, meaning that the teacher's central role in the classroom is to transmit knowledge to learners and students must directly absorb information (Rosenshine & Stevens, 1986; Good & Brophy, 1991). This process is based on information processing theory (Rumelhart, 1980). The student's role is reception and compliance (Ausubel, 1963, 1968). In this model the teacher's performance in front of students is critical, and in many school districts teachers are evaluated for their ability to establish "effective" eye contact, use different kinds of questions, pause in explanations to allow pupil reflection, use of a variety of concepts, and redirect student questions, and so forth---a process of disassembling knowledge into small bits for students to comprehend.reject the assumption of simplification by isolation focus on how nervous systems have evolved to function in real-world contexts object to the view of learning as the long-term storage of knowledge
Much of the impetus for constructivism as an educational movement stems from a reaction to the over-reliance in classrooms on rote memorization, which is regarded as a serious problem in education (Lipman, 1991). Many critics of education insist the most important goal of school is to teach children how to think and solve problems. Some school curricula are based on learner-centered constructivism to promote students who can function successfully in real-world contexts (e.g., Anderson & Roth, 1989; Roth, 1989). Regardless of how well concepts and ideas are presented to children in a classroom, they will not really learn them unless they make personal use of them through some process. Recognizing that students master only those activities they actually practice (Anderson & Roth, 1989), an assumption of both constructivism and rote learning, some constructivists are intent on teaching pupils to use scientific knowledge in the same way as scientifically literate adults.
Many critics and researchers lament the fact that students who can answer complex questions and solve problems are unable to explain the underlying reasons or methods they use to reach their conclusions (Staver, 1989; Swamy, 1987). This is also an annual complaint when results of national testing programs are announced, such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress. For teachers, to "improve thinking" implies a thorough understanding of internal mental development, external forces, and the constantly changing relationship between internal and external states.
Changing students' thinking is a unique obstacle in education. According to Walberg (1991): ..."students' reasoning is often mistaken but logically consistent, confidently held, and difficult to change" (Walberg, 1991, p. 55). Kamiloff-Smith and Inhelder (1975) reported that children are highly resistant to changing theories, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. This implies that promoting genuine change in student thinking is difficult, at best.
Basic Influence on the
Development of Constructivism: While some attribute influence to Vygotsky
and others, Piaget's theory is fundamental to constructivism. It
implies the process of building, creating, or making mental structures
instead of merely absorbing or reproducing products. To Piaget, the
child's mind is self-organized by a constant antagonism between internal,
subjective mental states and external reality. In Piagetian theory
there is no objective ontological
reality. This progression occurs because of the reciprocal
effects of assimilation and accommodation, constantly forced to attain
an equilibrium between subjective and objective states.
Piaget used constructivism
to explain but not merely describe cognitive development (Flannagan, 1991).
He concluded that children engage in qualitatively different kinds of thinking
as they pass through various stages of development, meaning they do not
learn by practicing adult knowledge. Piaget discounted the relative
importance of maturation and was interested in the processes that emerge
as children discard previous ways of thinking for new ones. Intellectual
growth results from attempts of the child to solve problems, which in turn
causes the child to continually reconstruct the external world through
personal experience as internal representations.
Constructivism is described throughout Piagetian investigations, including investigations with class inclusion, physical causality, language, and the various applications of his classical tests to investigate concrete and formal thought. Although the tasks required of children by Piaget were very clearly arranged like a scientific investigation, children were free to respond in any manner. Piaget was intent on discovering the differences in a child's thinking and what the child can or cannot do without adult assistance or instruction at any stage of development. But unlike the eager parent or teacher wanting a child to understand, dialogues of Piaget's interactions with children reveal a continual probing, an interrogation with no feedback. Therefore, we have little guidance from Piaget about instructional matters, but if constructivism is to be useful in directing theories of learning it must account for instruction.
Constructivism and Instruction: Although learning environments can stimulate knowledge construction, they cannot have a direct influence on such structures. As Piaget (1959) commented, "these influences do not imprint themselves upon the child as on a photographic plate; they are 'assimilated,' i.e., deformed by the living being who comes under their sway, and they are incorporated into his own substance" (p. 256). Piaget (1969) explained, "according to this view, the organizing activity of the subject must be considered just as important as the connections inherent in the external stimuli, for the subject becomes aware of these connections only to the degree that he can assimilate them by means of his existing structures" (p. 5). Adult rules, standards, criteria, and many kinds of memorization required of students are simply imposed, nor can they necessarily be regarded as part of a child's own knowledge.
If children construct but do not internalize knowledge, how does this occur? Piaget used the concepts of assimilation and accommodation to explain the process. He concluded that the child constructs knowledge through the interplay of egocentric encounters with intervening reality. However, in Piaget's theory the processes that control knowledge creation are unclear. As presented by Piaget, assimilation and accommodation are vague and insufficient to explain learning; they do not expose the processes or relate them to the sources that regulate them, although it is clear from Piaget's writings that both the context and the child's reactions to it cause disturbances of the mental processes toward construction. In many conversations with children recorded by Piaget, there are important clues that may explain what processes stimulate and accompany the construction of knowledge. For example, children often preferred certain activities over others. Interest, curiosity, and surprise play an important role, but these circumstances typically received no elaboration by Piaget who, as an interrogator, observer, and recorder, ignored such reactions in his comments. They are of intense interest to the teacher.
Piaget's notions of assimilation and accommodation must not be equated with constructive internalization of externally available knowledge. According to Piaget, assimilation is an active response to a minor perturbation, and accommodation is an active response to a major perturbation of the child's existing representations of the world, when new experiences do not conform to internal expectations, when the child is confused or astonished by something at variance with personal expectations or beliefs about how reality ought to be.
Under the influence of the computer-inspired information processing theory (Niesser, 1967), it has been customary to describe "construction" as breaking down externally available knowledge into pieces, often known as features, and piecing them back together by connections (Rumelhart, 1977). This model seems to be consistent with common approaches to disassembling knowledge for effective teaching (Rosenshine & Stevens, 1986; Good & Brophy, 1991), using task analysis and behavioral objectives, and developing lesson plans. This type of constructive internalization is said to occur and continue consciously until the connections among features become automatic through repetition (Anderson, 1990). The internalization-automatization view of learning is clearly not what Piaget meant by construction, but this is the theoretical basis for most school learning and instructional technology. Instructional technology is steeped in this process, erecting specific behavioral objectives for instructional units and measuring outcomes against stated objectives. Task analyses is a tool used in instructional design to disassemble a process into many sequential steps.
In all levels (cell, organism, species), parts or elements are not isolated--everything is dependent upon the whole that pervades it. Rather than the parts determining the whole, or the whole existing without regard for the parts, the whole and the parts form a reciprocal system that sustains the viability of all. For Piaget, mental development is biological construction, with the whole and the parts interacting and changing through developmental experiences. Piaget's terminology may be vague but his views based on genetic epistemology are consistent with biological functioning.
Piaget used schema in his writings, a term that has caused considerable confusion in the educational literature. An alternative is thematic knowledge (Iran-Nejad, 1989), which may be related to but not equal to "schema" or mental structures of constructivism. An important qualification, in line with Piaget's theory, is that schemas are not program-like, long-term memory structures of modern information processing theory. From a biofunctional viewpoint, the brain continually retains live representations or constructions under active (intentional) and dynamic (spontaneous) self-regulation (Iran-Nejad, 1989, 1990).
There is direct and live awareness of ongoing constructions through executive self-regulation, which occurs actively when the system consciously and intentionally regulates the activity of its own components, as in problem-solving, and through nonexecutive self-regulation, which occurs dynamically when components of the system regulate their activity spontaneously according to biological principles of organization. Dynamic activity is much more extensive than conscious, intentional activity. This is evident in the preponderance of Piagetian research that reveals that children are often unaware of underlying reasoning and have great difficulty describing their thoughts when asked to explain their decisions. Children can sing but do not generate a theory of music; they speak but do not list the rules of grammar; they can solve problems but are often unable to explain their reasoning.
Construction of knowledge is a process of self-regulation that surpasses simple memory explanations (Palmer & Goetz, 1988; Schmeck, 1988; Weinstein, Goetz, & Alexander, 1988). In this view, knowledge is thematic live awareness--an evolving and indivisible product of ongoing brain functioning. In this perspective, the central nervous system is capable of engaging in higher-level functions (those under executive or person-regulated control), because the individual's attention is not actively involved in monitoring and controlling thousands of processes. This permits extensive control-free or attention-free constructive activity. Instead of allocating attention to every detail, the central nervous system delegates, so to speak, attention or responsibility for learning to the subsystems of the nervous system, which operate dynamically (or spontaneously).
Constructivism is dynamic intelligence, the parts organize in a coordinated system which work together to solve a problem when the individual is interested, challenged, or goal directed, but not necessarily aware of the details of the ongoing processes. Because knowledge is created dynamically, any change in one part has spontaneous (context-determined, as opposed to connection-determined) implications for the functioning of other parts, a central feature of Piagetian theory considered as part-to-whole interactions. Every combination of the parts is a new combination and not just an algorithm, switched-on program, or information retrieval. All information is constantly live, although not always conscious, and even combinations that repeat the past exactly (memory) are really new combinations; the process reconstructs the past but does not copy it.
The individual reconstructs the past idiosyncratically. It is possible that intervening knowledge acquired since an event will alter the reconstruction of the original event, such as recalling things that never happened (false memory). This could not occur if recall were connection-determined and program-like. Schwartz and Reisberg (1991) note: ". . . it appears that the true, objective past is not what is remembered. Instead, what is preserved is the past-as-understood, with no advantage for the exact event as it actually unfolded (p. 345)." The "past as understood" may encompass a variety of factors, including such aspects as motivation, interest, or state of receptivity at the time that permit incorporation of new knowledge and give meaning or "understanding" to an event.
An assumption underlying most educational and psychological theories is that the brain is principally a memory system. Confrey (1990) has called for more research on the issues of memory and reflective abstraction in constructivism. Noting that a "storage container" view of memory has been useful, Confrey points out that it has not explained why certain conceptions of children are so persistent and how reconstruction, rather than retrieval, occurs.
Intelligence probably did not evolve as the nervous system's solution to memory requirements but as a response to problems of survival in a natural environment (Marsh & Iran-Nejad, 1992). If memory occurs in constructivism, it is because it is constructed for some internal, personal reason. As Piaget noted, memories are contorted as they are assimilated by the child to meet immediate needs. Piaget (1969) discounts the importance of memory in learning, although he believed that "image-memory" may play some part, and he said that not all conservation of the past is memory: "All schemas continue to function independently of 'memory'" (p. 81).
The human nervous system and its processes evolved to solve survival problems in a natural environment, a major concern for most human beings over the last 50,000 years. Memory is obviously important but the brain's functional processes are not explicit memory processes, as proposed by long-term storage metaphors of modern information processing theory (e.g., Rumelhart, 1980) or by network metaphors of parallel distributed processing connectionism (Rumelhart, Smolensky, McClelland, & Hinton, 1986). Human intelligence did not evolve principally as the nervous system's solution to memory requirements (study, reading, writing, and so forth) but through responses to problems in a natural environment (finding food, shelter, and safety). The very relationship an organism holds on an ongoing basis with its environment is the context for knowledge creation, not compartmentalized and dissociated. Ong (1982) clarifies this point:
Human beings in primary oral cultures, those untouched by writing in any form, learn a great deal and possess and practice great wisdom, but they do not 'study.' . . . They learn by apprenticeship - hunting with experienced hunters, for example - by discipleship, which is a kind of apprenticeship, by listening, by repeating what they hear, by mastering proverbs and ways of combining and recombining them, by assimilating other formulary material, by participation in a kind of corporate retrospection - not by study in the strict sense (p. 9).In traditional classroom instruction the words of the teacher, words in print, and other activities, including required memorization, are the major vehicles for "carrying information" to pupils. Children who do not remember well what the teacher said or the content of books may be considered to have memory and learning problems. But memorizing the knowledge others have created is often not successful because knowledge is not a ready-made, transferable product but rather a product of the learner's thinking. In any case, it is quite a departure from the demands on the species for most of its history.
Learning that is relegated strictly to external control of list-like memorization is easily forgotten and not meaningfully related to internal themes. Learning occurs best if it is related to an authentic interest, as implied in dynamic learning. In fact, "good" students usually memorize information to satisfy school evaluation requirements. This is one reason that performance assessment is advocated instead of factual testing (Weinberg, 1989). In authentic learning, when a process is replicated, it does so more effectively through organic, flexible learning, similar to equilibration states that support the assimilation and accommodation described by Piaget. The system works by integration and self-regulation of parts, changing with each reconstruction as new environmental challenges are encountered. Complexity in nature is formed on existing processes, so a totally new system is not created without incorporating lower processes. There is no reason to believe, for example, that the self-regulatory immune system, of which we have no conscious awareness, could not have an analog in cognition.
In classroom activities where the teacher talks most of the time, the learner is required to exert a great deal of attention (a difficult task), comprehend terms the teacher uses (a more difficult task), impose order on the incoming temporal stream of information (an often impossible task), make judgments about the quality and significance of the information (an unrealistic task), attempt to write down as much as possible (a torturous task), and memorize for later reproduction the information presumed to be important (for most students, the only conceivable task). The student must also sit in uncomfortable chairs and do this continually five to six hours a day, five days a week. There is little opportunity, beyond memorization, to create and act upon new knowledge.
Classroom "learning" is unnatural and something that does not occur in the early years of life when a child learns a language, and something most adults avoid after they have escaped formal education. The implications of constructivism, and of these elaborations on it, are to argue that children must have access to the same natural learning processes they employ before the enter school, and later, outside traditional classroom environments where interest and dynamic functions operate. In the unnatural classroom environment this does not occur.
Goals may arise for survival needs or for any reason at all. A child who develops interest in butterflies or baseball comes to "know" things about them for personal reasons, just as our distant ancestors came to know about scavenging, hunting, gathering, and tool making, or our more recent ancestors came to know about building cathedrals. Repetitions of experiences with objects or ideas in the environment form the cognitive structures of the intellect that, always active, can themselves be interrelated internally through multiple sources. Thus, one-to-one correspondence or formal operational thought are not external realities but are self-constructed knowledge for a purpose.
Elements of Vygotsky's Theory
Although Piaget is widely regarded as the patriarch of constructivism, constructivists have embraced other theorists, especially the Russian psychologist, L.S. Vygotsky. A contemporary and minor critic of Piaget, Vygotsky's career was cut short by his early death in 1934. His theory was made familiar to English speakers with translation of Thought and Language (1962; 1985) and Mind in Society (1978). Vygotsky considered an individual's cognitive system to be a direct result of and inseparable from social life (Vygotsky, 1987).
Central to Vygotsky's theory is that the human species is distinguished from others by use of tools, deliberate teaching, and intentional learning. Tools refer both to the variety of implements created by humans and psychological tools, such as language. The mind has social origins and the cultural tools available to the individual influence the nature of the mind that is constructed. Signs---graphical, verbal, and gestural---carry meaning between people, which is unique to the culture and variable within a culture at the familial and colloquial levels. It is here that Vygotsky believed that we may understand social influences and how culture forms the basis for translating perceptions into shared meanings and individual mental constructs.
Language and psychological processes develop initially as social, interpersonal interactions among people, which Vygotsky referred to as interpsychological. These are gradually "turned inward" or incorporated as internal tools, which he referred to as intrapsychological. In the first instance the individual learns by imitating the immediate social environment, which is influenced in different ways by the larger culture. The individual's psychological processes are always bound to the culture in some way because the individual uses a particular "set" of cultural tools, thus mental constructs are delimited by one's culture. Recognizing the hold that a culture has on an individual, as defined by this bond, limits to constructivism are implied.
Language development is based on word meaning. Vygotsky (1962) said that a word without meaning is not a word. Words are saturated with sense (Vygotsky, 1962). To be meaningful, a word must be part of inner speech and language. To acquire meaning, the child transforms the word as a symbol along with many kinds of contextual experiences. In his 1934 publication, Mind in Society, Vygotsky revealed his basic theory about human cognitive development in the book's title and this statement contained in it:
...the most significant moment in the course of intellectual development, which gives birth to the purely human forms of practical and abstract intelligence, occurs when speech and practical activity, two previously completely independent lines of development, converge (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 24).The significance of this "convergence" is that speech can be used to solve problems. According to Vygotsky the "interpersonal function" of speech, or the turning inward of social speech, enables children to organize their own behavior, a mechanism that is not commonly explained in constructivism, other than through the use of Piaget's theory of assimilation and accommodation. This point of view is found in the work of another Russian psychologist, Luria (1977). Signs permit cognitive construction. Sign mediated memory, voluntary attention, and concepts are developed on the basis of internalization of external activities begun at the social level.
This process being transformed continues to exist and to change as an external form of activity for a long time before definitively turning inward. For many functions, the stage of external signs lasts forever, that is, it is their final stage of development. Other functions develop further and gradually become inner functions. However, they take on the character of inner processes only as a result of a prolonged development. Their transfer inward is linked with changes in the laws governing their activity; they are incorporated into a new system with its own laws.The internalization of socially rooted and historically developed activities is the distinguishing feature of human psychology, the basis of the qualitative leap from animal to human psychology. Vygotsky (1978) introduced his views on teaching by identifying three popular theoretical approaches, each of which he immediately dismissed:
(1) processes of development are independent of learning, learning being extraneous to the process of developmentIn rejecting these theories Vygotsky identified the underlying problem with them: "Development or maturation is viewed as a precondition of learning but never the result of it" (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 80). Vygotsky contended that learning and development are intertwined from the first day of life, and learning cannot be matched to stages but must be determined by assessment of two developmental levels: (a) actual developmental level and (b) the zone of proximal development. The "zone of proximal development" is the "space" where teachers, parents, and peers may influence the child's development. The zone of proximal development is:
(2) learning is development
(3) a combination of the first two positions
. . .the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers (p. 86).As Bandura later proved, Vygotsky emphasized the importance to the child of imitating siblings, satisfying parents, seeking membership in groups and other social goals. Vygotsky's fundamental principle of development is social development:
In our conception, the true direction of the development of thinking is not from the individual to the socialised, but from the social to the individual. (Vygotsky, 1988, p. 32)Piaget ignored affect but it is apparent that Vygotsky did not separate cognition and affect.
When we approach the problem of the interrelation between thought and language and other aspects of mind, the first question that arises is that of intellect and affect. Their separation as subjects of study is a major weakness of traditional psychology. (Vygotsky, 1988, p. 10)By using and imposing the social system on the individual, which may have been a necessary justification for a Soviet theorist at the time, Vygotsky revealed kinship with Piaget by recognizing the importance of the social context in psychological development. Where Vygotsky departs markedly from Piaget, and for which he is most famous, is use of the "zone of proximal distance" (ZPD), which is a deliberate use of the "social to the individual" in classroom instruction. The ZPD is far less "constructivist" than many believe. The ZPD is a deliberate strategy used by the teacher to engage the student, connect prior understanding with new content or skills, and may be related to more modern concepts such as advance organizers of Asubel and scaffolding. Therefore, the ZPD does not ordinarily arise from the mind of the learner, rather it is a devise, a social construct, proposed by Vygotsky to conceptualize the apparent range of competence or understanding of a learner at any point, judged by the teacher, so that new content or skills may be introduced. It is conceivable that a motivated learner or group of learners might actually construct their own ZPD for social reasons for the "love" of learning.
Vygotsky's emphasis on imitation and learning is interesting for three important reasons. First, far from being a simple mimic or mechanical process, a child can only imitate within his or her developmental range or zone of proximal development. Second, the child is incapable of learning without social interaction and cooperation of peers and adults. Third, the child internalizes processes that are imitated, making learning a "culturally organized, specifically human, psychological" function.
Social Knowledge: The Substance of Mental Constructs
Constructivism holds that knowledge does not have a separate existence from the physical nervous system; it cannot exist in some complete form outside the learner and be internalized, stored, and reproduced at some later time. Piaget (1959) essentially said that children construct their own knowledge through the process of assimilation, causing new experiences to make sense in accordance with existing internal constructs. The culture and social system surrounding the child provide the ingredients of constructivism or the building blocks for cognitive development by means of signs the child incorporates from the environment. The initial process in transmission of the cultural and social systems of humans is imitation. Imitation has come to be recognized as a much more important factor in human development. Newborn infants are able to imitate facial movements and hand movements of adults, and imitation remains a powerful mechanism throughout childhood. The extent to which it is used by adults may not be as obvious, but certainly it can continue to play a significant role in certain kinds of learning. As Vygotsky put it, the critical concept is:
Children can imitate a variety of actions that go well beyond the limits of their own capabilities. Using imitation, children are capable of doing much more in collective activity or under the guidance of adults (1994, p. 88).Culture is particularly relevant in determining the meaning of events, people, and things (Applegate & Sypher, 1988). Vygotsky put it this way:
. . . human learning presupposes a specific social nature and a process by which children grow into the intellectual life of those around them (p. 88)."So although we may agree with Piaget that children construct but do not internalize information, the social context is, nonetheless, the critical factor for emerging concepts, for it is the only source of substance for psychological processes to form.
Social Learning Theory and Constructivism
The constructivist writers, Brooks and Brooks (1993), excoriate traditional education for being "mimetic" or expecting students to repeat or mime newly presented information. Furthermore, they say:
...Deep understanding, not imitative behavior, is the goal, But, capturing another person's understanding is, if anything a paradoxical enterprise. Unlike the repetition of prescribed behaviors, the act of transforming ideas into broader, more comprehensive images escapes concise description. We see neither the transformed concept nor the process of construction that preceded its transformation. The only discernible aspect is, once again, the student's behavior; but a different type of behavior. In the constructivist approach, we look not for what students can repeat, but for what they can generate, demonstrate, and exhibit (p. 16).According to Vygotsky it would be impossible for children to "generate, demonstrate, and exhibit" without first imitating. Imitation is a necessary prerequisite for ultimate, deep understanding. Children imitate their parents, siblings, playmates, characters on television, and peer models, something Bandura's research has proved. The child's language, articulation, pronunciation and regional accent, style of dress, expressions, and political and religious attitudes are all initiated and reinforced by imitation. Discarding a regional accent requires the imitation of another model.
To Piaget, the child's mind is self-organized by a constant antagonism between internal, subjective mental states and external reality, a progression of internalization that occurs because of the reciprocal effects of assimilation and accommodation, constantly forcing the child to attain an equilibrium between subjective and objective states. Piaget demonstrated that children acquire concepts by constructing them from the inside, in interaction with the environment, rather than by internalizing them from the environment. When Vygotsky used internalization, he referred to a similar process. He described it as a series of transformations. First, reconstruction of operations that initially represent external activity starts to occur internally. He refers to sign-use activity that comes to be evident in practical intelligence, voluntary attention, and memory. Secondly, interpersonal processes are transformed into intrapersonal processes. Each function in cultural development occurs twice, on the social level and then on the individual level. This applies to voluntary attention, logical memory, and concept formation, all originating through actual relationships with other humans. Finally, the transformation of a process to a mature intrapersonal one occurs over a long series of developmental events.
Peer Influence
Rutter (1983) attributed the success of effective schools to social climate, which may be influenced by adults and peer groups, and the work of Bandura is well known to explain this. Harris (1995) has shown that heredity accounts for only about half of the reliable variation among adults in personality characteristics. Data from birth-order studies and research about children with and without siblings show that group socialization explains the shaping of adult personality characteristics through experiences outside the home in the company of peers (Harris, 1995).
If Vygotsky is correct, educators may have greater influence by concentrating on the most powerful source of social influence on the child outside the family---the peer group. The process by which a child becomes socialized, especially in the United States, is through the peer culture and much less through influences of the family. It has a greater effect on personality, values, attitudes, and achievement than any other sources of influence. As Harris (1995) points out:
What children learn in the context of their home may not, in fact, work in the world outside the home...A central assumption...is that socialization is a highly context-dependent form of learning. Children learn separately how to behave at home and how to behave when they are not at home. The manner of learning, the reinforcement contingencies, may also be quite different: In the home they may be reprimanded for mistakes and praised when they behave appropriately; out of the home they may be ridiculed for mistakes and ignored when they behave appropriately (p. 462).All primates, including humans, tend to divide the world into "us" versus "them" conceptualizations (Russell, 1993), to be tribal, territorial, and competitive. Human social contexts are based on both individual and group identities. Each group has distinct characteristics setting the group apart from others. Harris used several sources to support her contentions. Group members prefer the association of their group to others (Tajifel, 1970). There is frequently hostility to other groups (Zimbardo, 1972; Sherif, Harvey, White, Hood & Sherif, 1961). For example, in the latter study, 11-year-old boys were randomly assigned to two groups at a camp, given the names "Rattlers" and "Eagles," and there was hostility toward each other group before they ever met. The first time the Rattlers heard the Eagles playing at a distance, they wanted to "run them off" (Sherif et al., 1961, p. 78). As Harris notes, differences between groups arise simply on the basis that another group exists or is believed to exist. As Wilder (1986) indicated, persons act to increase the magnitude of assumed group differences and to adopt highly similar norms within the group. Personality traits, attitudes toward the school, and beliefs and values are largely determined by the group in which a child is assimilated, rather than the family.
Xenophobia or "fear of the other" is an atavism that may serve a sociobiological purpose. Much of childhood in the concrete period described by Piaget is based on classification and concept development, so same and different seem to be the basic building blocks of knowledge. In The Third Chimpanzee, Diamond speculates on the possibility that the Neanderthal was too repugnant to be appealing to Cro-Magnon man for reproduction. Hate and fear may be atavistic, based on the primal race war (L'etranger, L'outre of myth, literature and history). The alien is an abomination, a barbarian, a threat, subhuman; before war is declared on another people there is considerable propaganda devoted to characterizing the enemy as less than human or "demonizing" the foe. The caste system of India is based on such distinctions. Preferences of form exist in all species. The extremely long tails of the male bird of paradise is the result of a mating selection process; females prefer to mate with males who have the longest plumage. In all species sexual attraction seems to be based on certain traits and visual symmetry.
Children divide into groups by gender and then by ethnicity (Schofield, 1981). A visit to elementary and high school cafeterias shows the progression. Harris (1995) indicates that such behavior has an evolutionary basis, as does Diamond. From childhood through adolescence, children form social groups that are based on perceived within-group similarities and between group differences (Kruger, 1992). This explains football rivalries, clothing fads, fraternities and sororities, gang behavior, and risking one's life for wearing the wrong colors in the wrong neighborhood. Adult examples include social stratification, prejudice, tribal massacres in Rwanda, exterminations in Bosnia, and the never-ending conflict in Ireland. Kindermann (1993) has shown that cliques of students always share the same attitudes toward schoolwork. Until high school, these groups are unstable and membership shifts frequently. If the child's group aspires to school achievement, the child will also aspire. Harris, (1995) said:
In today's urbanized societies, socialization gets its start in the nursery school or day-care center, gathers momentum in the same-age, same-sex peer groups of school-age children, and approaches asymptote in the mixed sex crowds of adolescents. It is within these groups...that the psychological characteristics that a child is born with become permanently modified by the environment. Two processes, assimilation and differentiation, are responsible for the modification (pp. 482-483).By elaborating on constructivism with Vygotsky's theory and other social theories, social constructivism can explain learning in the social setting as interaction with personal constructions. In the family the child and family members share contexts that can be regarded as shared social constructs, which is also a critical context for determining individual constructs. This is also extremely powerful within the peer group.
If shared constructions and social relations are critical for individual learning, the social setting of the school and the classroom are of much greater importance than has been generally considered in educational research and practice. The objectives of improved education must focus on the influences of social setting and context on cognitive development. Constructivist theory has attempted to alter classroom teaching, but this is insufficient in the information age and the global economy. It is now necessary to also consider technology as part of the culture and its potential for shared social meaning.
Technology, Classroom Instruction, and Social Learning
Social organization of the classroom has been based on the authority of the teacher, both as the controlling agent in the classroom and the authority about knowledge. In the belief that smaller class size and individualization are important. Methods to compensate for the presumed disadvantages of large group instruction have included smaller class size, mastery learning, peer tutoring, computer-based tutoring, cooperative learning, and block scheduling.
Smaller class size, per se, has not shown significant achievement in comparative research. Fewer students will not necessarily result in higher achievement, although it will certainly result in higher costs. By contrast, Japanese and Chinese classes are large, an average of 45 pupils compared to 25 in America, so class size in the United States is not large by international standards (Stevenson and Stigler, 1992), and there is no tracking. The apparent perceived need for teachers in the United States is to have a smaller group to control and manage, preferably with students of similar ability, and to be able to provide individualized support. Individualization has long been an unattainable desire in education, except with the belief that computers could provide such instruction, which was an early expectation of Suppes in 1968.
Most computer-assisted instruction has been designed in terms of behaviorist principles. In practice, curriculum design on the computer is similar to that of a lesson plan, where the teacher or designer breaks "knowledge" into small pieces, classifies it according to levels of learning based on Gagne's hierarchy or Bloom's taxonomy. Clear objectives are stated, often with the expected behavioral outcome anticipated. Most instructional programs and integrated learning systems have considerable testing built in. Niemiec, Blackwell, and Walberg (1986) reported that, compared to peer tutoring, adult tutoring, increasing the length of the school day, and decreasing class size, an average computer-assisted instructional program produces the greatest gains per $100 of instructional expenditure. Walberg (1991) examined 377 research studies carefully selected for quality of research designs to compare computer-assisted instruction with conventional instruction. He found that computer-assisted instruction coupled with classroom teaching is superior to ordinary classroom instruction without computer assistance. Television, videodisc, and interactive computer programs have shown gains in student achievement in several subject areas (Reiber, 1988; Grimes, Krehbiel, Nielsen, & Niss, 1989).
It is difficult to know what computers, multimedia, hypertext, and other technologies in the future will do to enhance learning. For now it is clear that a computer or a teacher can "teach knowledge in isolation," and the computer can do it more cost effectively (Walberg, 1991). Despite its apparent effectiveness, computer-assisted instruction has been criticized by educators and others because it is passive. In effect, however, the computer or the teacher are the "interactive" parts of the teaching and learning process. What do teachers do? They make presentations, provide examples, tutorials, drill, make simulations, and provide references to sources of information. They may also inspire, but the model must be selected by the modeler. Computers can do similar things, if they do not inspire. Making computer-based learning coincide with constructivist theories of learning may be a worthy goal for improved individualized instruction. However, using technology for individualization may be missing the point and overlooking its real potential in social constructions.
The best use of the computer and multimedia may be as part of the social interactions of students, in small groups and over the network, to support collaborative learning in project-based learning. Hypertext may be an accessible reference tool, more useful and immediate than a library, but it may also be an effective tool for cooperative learning. Cooperative learning "seeks to locate authority in neither the text nor the reader but in . . . interpretive communities" (Trimbur 1989, p. 613). Cooperation requires that students talk and think and write together, solve problems without the teacher's direct supervision and guidance.
Resnick (1987) examined use of cognitive and physical tools in and outside school and noted that the generalizations and symbolic rules required for solutions to classroom problems contrast sharply with real-world problems, which are situation-specific and context-based. As Resnick makes clear, in society, including the family and the emerging workplace, problem solving requires shared tasks. Technology is now an indispensable tool in society and can allow students to engage in real-world interactions with people by means of electronic mail, computer conferencing, video conferencing, and groupware, what some refer to as the technoculture. The computer may be more useful in serving as a basis for solving real-world problems, at least more so than by means of passive lectures.
Gradually, it seems inevitable that the impact of computer-based information technologies on society will alter the nature of all institutions, including education. Educational computing and distance education are not really about alternatives as much as they are about the emergence of a technoculture. Many teenagers today communicate daily and routinely with scores of peers and often with different identities, a much more expansive mode of communication than the telephone.Don Tapscott has documented the habits and thinking of the "net generation" and makes this assessment:
A new youth culture, one that involves more than just the pop culture of music, MTV and the movies, is emerging out of N-Gen's use of interactive media. It also involves the experience of being part of the largest generation in the world. We should pay attention to this culture which will very soon create the workplace and the society of tomorrow.Emotional Intelligence has its roots in Thorndike's concept of "social intelligence" (Thorndike, 1920). Thorndike envisioned social, concrete, and abstract intelligence as the major categories of intelligence. However, only concrete and abstract intelligence have been studied extensively. Vygotsky was concerned with social learning, what is now often called situated cognition or authentic learning. All higher cognitive functions have their origins in social relations. The school has often cut-off social interactions between students and from the real world. The success of collaborative learning, block scheduling, and peer tutoring may be the result of shared social construction and shared meaning. Faigley (1992) notes that electronic discourse offers a way to explore how identity is multiply constructed and how agency resides in the power of connecting with others. According to Faigley, electronic discussions invite participation and decenter the authority of the teacher and the text. Such orientation alters the relationships of students to their teachers and their peers. Having to deal with different viewpoints, they must build consensus and negotiate different meaning with others. Rather than merely a machine for drill or a library resource, technology is now part of the social context of society. Through distance education, electronic mail, conferencing, and interactive hypermedia, students can interact and encounter multiple perspectives. How much "electronic cultures" and hypertext will actually provide new advantages we cannot know, but it is apparent that the technology is challenging traditional and textual authorities and hierarchical relationships.
Did teaching change with the invention of writing and the printing press? Did Socrates' condemnation of books stifle the acceptance of books in teaching? Some writers assert that computers, e-mail and multimedia are impersonal. Are they? Many teachers find that students will freely write to them in e-mail to ask many questions, but these same students never darken the door during office hours. Some writers argue that the Internet enables students to cheat, and there is no assurance that the work provided is original. This is, in fact, a problem in a traditional classroom. But if we envision the possibility of learning as a social compact among groups or teams of learners, then the solitary scholar is not as important as in the former culture. As in any complex emergent system, there will be transformation. New ways, new formats, unique conceptualizations of what is "work" and how it is produced and evaluated.
In accordance with Vygotsky's notions of mind in society and the zone of proximal development, perhaps educators can incorporate technology to transform learning through a social context that reflects a change from knowledge transmission (lecture and text) to student-centered learning that promotes individual construction and shared meaning. Computers in the classroom may not be drill and testing, rather it could mean cooperative learning, collaborative project-based school work, and learning based on asynchronous and synchronous applications, and collaborative databases.
The ability to work effectively in small groups is increasingly regarded as important as a workplace skill, not just an alternative instructional method in school. Workers are expected to cooperate to achieve organizational effectiveness. In most businesses and classrooms where group process is important, there are small group contexts. Many businesses have transient or permanent product development teams and cross-teams. While teaching based on conventional practices vests total authority on the teacher, learning in groups has different dynamics and manifestations of power, perception, motivation, leadership and decision making (Faigley, 1992). Students must be active, involved, and facilitating, rather than passive. Students must learn to give and receive feedback and reach consensus. In a broader perspective, it is now possible to have "virtual" relationships with people anywhere in the world, something either impossible or extremely expensive to do on the telephone.
The social context will no longer be only the classroom, nor the teacher, nor the computer as knowledge presenter. The increasing importance of technology in the classroom portends the day when group processes will not be limited to a particular physical space, such as the classroom, but to an extended virtual group available through technology. The Internet will undoubtedly continue to grow significantly as an important medium for delivering training, instruction, and group meetings. It seems obvious that social learning theory will be an important part of understanding the new learning environment, social dynamics, motivation, leadership, and authority.
Implications for Teaching: Confrey (1990) described how the work of Piaget influenced the development of curricula in various disciplines that sought to weave organizing concepts into the curriculum beginning in the early grades, but less attention was placed on the fact that children have idiographic ways of understanding that may differ or conflict with beliefs held by experts. What was ignored, according to Confrey, was that a child "develops certain perspectives and beliefs that are functionally adaptive, and these perspectives and beliefs may or may not correspond well with the views of disciplinary experts" (p. 8). On the other hand, although Piaget avoided making recommendations about how to teach children, this statement provides insight to his thoughts on the matter:
As for those new methods of education that have had the most durable success, and which without doubt constitute the foundation of tomorrow's active school, they all more or less draw their inspiration from a doctrine of the golden mean, allowing room both for internal structural maturation and also for the influences of experience and of the social and physical environment. As opposed to the traditional school, which denies the existence of the first of these factors by identifying the child with the adult from the outset, these methods take the stages of mental development into account; but, as opposed to those theories based on the idea of purely hereditary maturation, they also believe in the possibility of influencing that development. (Piaget & Inhelder, 1970, pp. 169-170.Many educators and psychologists have interpreted Piagetian theories variously as rigid developmental stages or phases that could be "speeded up" developmentally by a proper curriculum, or as milestones indicating what kind of subject matter to teach. To many, adolescence is that time when the child can finally understand like an adult. Piaget and Inhelder (1958) concluded that the adolescent can begin to build "systems" or "theories," but the child cannot build systems and "never thinks about his own thought" (p. 339). This is discouraging to those who would directly influence the child's thought. The problem of instruction is captured by Kindsbetter, Wilen, and Ishler (1989):
To the extent that teachers operate primarily on the basis of personal experience, they perform analogously to the tribal medicine man. Through his use of both mystique and proficiency with primitive medicines, he may actually perform a valuable service to his fellow tribespeople. His practice, however, lacks a rationally developed base. Little change occurs in his practice from generation to generation because there is essentially no understanding of the causes, and instead simply a recognition and treatment of symptoms (p. 8-9).Constructivism may be the basis for reforming education and improving "thinking" skills. However, there is no assurance it will be better than the current system unless we answer some important questions. Another problem is that direct instruction, which has been based on several decades of process-product research, has been incorporated in most teacher training curricula, state educational standards, and even legislation. The "effective" teaching methods derived from this research tradition have been summarized and recommended as generalizable methods to be applied in any classroom, regardless of content. A fundamental assumption in direct instruction, owing to both reductionist influences of behaviorism and process-product research, is that knowledge exists as a separate entity that can be decontextualized and broken into small pieces to be learned.
A major problem of the current
curriculum is both "..the psychology experiment and the school curriculum
focus on
memory for isolated concepts
and facts, thereby fragmenting learning to such a degree that results are
inapplicable in
authentic real-world contexts"
(Iran-Nejad & Marsh, 1993). The two assumptions in current educational
theory and
practice are: (a) knowledge
is a separate product and (b) knowledge should be simplified and isolated.
The first assumption is based on the premise that knowledge exists separately
from the central nervous system or the mind and, thus, can exist in some
complete form outside the student, where it can be transferred, stored,
and reproduced later in the brain. The typical school curriculum is based
on such a structure; important knowledge is often stated in behavioral
objectives. The second assumption implies that complex knowledge can be
learned simply by breaking it into pieces for easy consumption by learners.
Pressures for high-stakes testing and a "national" curriculum force schools
to reinforce coverage of a curriculum a mile wide and an inch deep with
emphasis on memorization.
Separated by disciplines,
mathematics is unrelated to science, science is unrelated to language arts,
and so forth, and each "subject" becomes isolated and distinct as bodies
of information to be memorized independently. And the
simplification process does
not end there. Teachers are separated into departments by discipline and
pupils are grouped on the basis of ability and tracked through the system.
In the traditional classroom the child is not permitted to use whole experiences or learn dynamically but is usually limited to narrow "active" processes: concentrating to pay attention and posing self-questions or creating mnemonics. Viewing traditional teaching from the child's point of view, classroom learning is mysterious, confusing, and arbitrary. As Pechman (1992) notes, schools try to teach children to use the formal tools of academic disciplines-- vocabulary, mathematical formulas, scientific procedures---but many children find few opportunities outside of school to practice what they are taught. "The resulting inauthenticity of classroom activity makes it difficult for children to see how school learning applies to their lives" (p. 33).
The quality of a student's
education is the result of the school learning environment and the importance
attached to
education by the student
and his or her family and peers. The learning climate of the school can
have significant impact on students, depending upon teachers' attitudes
and behaviors and those of peers. Obviously, if students come prepared
to learn, they will have a better experience, especially if most peers
also value learning, but the environment must be conducive to learning
through encouragement and support. Research in constructivism, particularly
domain specific research, is incompatible with direct instruction, philosophically
and structurally, and assessing children's conceptions and teachers' thinking
are not consonant with standardized test criteria.
The changing environment of education can create complications, such as reconciling constructivism with such trends as outcomes-based education---which is founded on the intention to define, design, deliver, and document instruction and assessment in terms of intended outcomes. Outcomes can apparently be intermediate or minimal competencies (mastery) and developmental outcomes (integrated products). Thus, the emphasis is on mastery, which contrasts sharply with constructivism. Outcomes-based education is employed to change schools, hold them accountable, and monitor them based on expressed outcomes. Standards, even if documented in "real-world" ways, can be antagonistic to constructivism, depending upon the structure developed by the school curriculum.
Alternative or authentic assessment (portfolio being one example) is not necessarily congruent with constructivism if the curriculum is based on outcomes-based education or other models for accountability. For knowledge to be considered more than information and for learners to become constructive in the classroom, the curriculum must be changed and we must develop methods of constructivist teaching. Constructivist concepts are intuitively appealing but there is little evidence that we know how to capture the interests of students or to affect goal-directed behavior. If constructivism is to succeed as a method of classroom learning, there is much to learn about the ways to make learning appealing, interesting, goal directed, and relevant---in other words more natural. If it is to be natural, it must be like the learning that children achieve prior to entering school where they negotiate with others on a daily basis to establish meaning.
Ramberg and Karlgren make an interesting point:
Rather than either viewing knowledge as objectively existing "out there" or as subjective constructions of individuals, knowledge is created and maintained in interaction with others, and it is constantly renegotiated, developed, and refined. In some sense knowledge is out there - it certainly is not subjectively "inside" individuals. Wrong and right rule-following, e.g., is as Wittgenstein argued, not something that can be done on one's own. The criterion for what is a right versus a wrong way of following a rule can only be maintained if there is a community which follows the rule and which can correct an individual's behavior.As indicated above, this is where the computer and networking can have the greatest impact, not necessarily as an electronic worksheet.
Constructivists see knowledge as an interconnection among ideas. The implication is that the teacher must be reflective and negotiate a curriculum among the interests of students, shifting the learning environment, and constantly adjusting instruction to account for emerging interests and experiences. Constructivists perceive a community of learners connecting the personal experiences of each learner to the group and to the culture. The constructivist might conceptualize instructivism as stamping out products in a factory or regurgitation of memorized facts.Summary
Instructivists emphasize the itemization of content (core knowledge). The implication is there should be specific objectives, a standardized curriculum, group instruction, and performance of teachers and students frequently examined. Instructivists perceive a classroom where students are obedient and learning is a matter of individual accountability, a solitary scholarship. An instructivist might conceptualize constructivism in a science class to mean a student does not learn the basic facts of biology but writes an essay on how it feels to be a groundhog.
These extremes are problematic
for instructional designers, as other parts of this course will reveal.
Perhaps we may yet answer the question posed by Karin
M. Wiburg: Is it Time to Exchange Skinner's Teaching Machine
for
Dewey's Toolbox?
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