From the book, ‘Tuition to Intuition’ by Dr.K.N.Anandan (pg.no.284)
Susan Hanley describes her perspective on the objectivist
model:
Von Glaserseld’s (1995b) in radical constructivist
conception of learning says, the teachers play the role of a “midwife in the
birth of understanding” as opposed to being “mechanics of knowledge transfer”.
He argues that: “From the constructivist perspective, learning is not a stimulus-response
phenomenon. It requires self-regulation and the building of conceptual
structures through reflection and abstraction.” Fosnot (1996) adds that ‘rather
than behaviours or skills as the goal of instruction, concept development and deep
understanding are the foci.”
In constructivist paradigm, learning emphasizes the process
and not the product. How one arrives at a particular answer, and not the
retrieval of an ‘objectively true solution’, is what is important. Learning is
a process of constructing meaningful representations, of making sense of one’s
experiential world. In this process, students’ errors are seen in positive
light and as a means of gaining insight into how they are organizing their experiential
world. The notion of doing something ‘right’ or ‘correctly’ is to do something
that fits with ‘an order one has established oneself’. This perspective is
consistent with the constructivist tendency to privilege multiple truths,
representations, perspectives and realities.
Design principles of Constructivism
Jonassen (1991) notes that many educators and cognitive
psychologists have applied constructivism to the development of learning
environments. From these applications, he has isolated a number of design
principles:
- Create real-world environments that employ the context in which learning is relevant;
- Focus on realistic approaches to solving real-world problems;
- The instructor is a coach and analyzer of the strategies used to solve these problems;
- Stress conceptual interrelatedness, providing multiple representations or perspectives on the content;
- Instructional goals and objectives should be negotiated and not imposed;
- Evaluation should serve as a self-analysis tool;
- Provide tools and environments that help learners interpret the multiple perspectives of the world;
- Learning should be internally controlled and mediated by the learner
Jonassesn (1994) summarizes what he refers to as “the
implications of constructivism for instructional design”. The following
principles illustrate how knowledge construction can be facilitated:
- Provide multiple representations of reality;
- Represent the natural complexity of the real world;
- Focus on knowledge construction, not reproduction;
- Present authentic tasks (contextualizing rather than abstracting instruction);
- Provide real-world, case-based learning environments, rather than pre-determined instructional sequences;
- Foster reflective practice;
- Enable context-and content dependent knowledge construction;
- Support collaborative construction of knowledge through social negotiation.
