hi David,
thanks for the link, it looks like an interesting historical study about maths education
some good readings at MIT open courseware: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Media-Arts-and-Sciences/MAS-962Spring-2003/CourseH... The nature of constructionist learning
I'm sure there is bad constructivism (open ended poorly designed discovery learning) and good constructionism. Also there is social constructivism which has become mainstream in my locality (South Australia), a sort of top down "socially aware" DIY-ism with incredibly vague benchmarks
The role of the teacher is a huge variable. I doubt that "controlled blind large group studies" would find satisfactory ways to factor this in
Where does that leave us? Years ago I wrote to MIT and obtained a bunch of PhD studies by Papert students (eg. Idit Harel, Yasmin Kafai, Kevin McGee etc). It was all good work. The method was along the lines of a detailed study of a small group - depth rather than breadth, one of the terminologies was "thick descriptors" rather than "thin descriptors". There has been a lot of good research and practice. Personally I don't doubt that constructionism works - but its a mindset, a world view. It's hard to "prove" that it works because it's a whole environment that can be built and sustained by the right educational leader. But when that leader leaves the environment normally collapses.
There are some real problems - ** the way things are measured in schools - its easy to measure recall but hard to measure or even to define deeper learning. Schools tend to measure mainly recall and so this undermines more creative teaching. I saw some coverage recently about "no child left behind" which featured creative teachers in tears about how standardised testing had destroyed their teaching
** the difficulty of training teachers in creative methods. Papert has written about the competencies required
- Skilled in modern learning theories and psychology - Skilled in relating to a variety of children - Skilled in detecting new, important elements of their student's culture - Skilled in cross curricular applications - Skilled in computing - Able to apply a variety of skills creatively
http://www.users.on.net/~billkerr/a/papert.htm
** the ability of poor teachers to hide behind vague social constructivist standards, which tends to discredit the "good constructivism"
Anyway, just some thoughts for discussion
cheers, - Bill