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/CourseHome/
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
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
--
Bill Kerr
http://billkerr2.blogspot.com/


On Nov 22, 2007 4:32 AM, David Corking < lists@dcorking.com> wrote:
Mark wrote:

> Re: attempts with constructivism
>
> I hope you're right. I have heard criticisms of constructivism, based on
> anecdotes, but I've always wondered whether what's been evaluated is
> actually constructivism or just some group's ideological interpretation of
> it (the group that says they're implementing the pedagogy, that is). I
> haven't studied it in detail, but the ideas behind it, as presented by Kay,
> make sense to me.

I think it is worth studying in detail, but I am not sure where to
start.  First I think we need to learn to distinguish among

1. constructivism the psychological hypothesis - as proposed by Piaget
as I understand
2. constructivism the pedagogy
3. constructionism - another pedagogy - and a word coined by Seymour
Papert.  Note the 3rd syllable.

(There is also constructivism the epistemology, which I can't even
spell, that also originates with Piaget.)

I recently read this unsympathetic 2003 article on the US history of
constructivist pedagogy in maths
http://www.csun.edu/~vcmth00m/AHistory.html
But it is largely anecdotal (which is fine for a historian, but not
when we are responsible for the education of the next generation.)

However, beyond such material, I get thoroughly confused by an
inability to distinguish proven knowledge, accepted wisdom, and pure
pseudo-science.    It seems that a lot of educational research is done
by anecdote rather than by controlled blind large group studies.  Any
pointers to the good stuff?  Or tips to help a natural scientist to
understand the research methods of the social sciences?

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