Hi David --
I think "constructivism" (like "object-oriented") has been so appropriated and redefined as to be a useless term today (I certainly don't know what it means -- and am not sure I ever did).
I think it's much better to simply try to puzzle out the nature of the desired learning, and then to find workable pathways for the different kinds of learners. This has been done quite well in (admittedly simpler) areas like sports and music, where the learner has the distinct advantage of being able to watch practitioners and gain some idea of what the subject area is all about and what might be fun and rewarding about it.
Two of the biggest barriers to math and science learner are (a) the prospective learner has very little idea what the activities actually are (though they still might think they could be "cool" because of "rocket ships", etc.), and (b) there are so few real practitioners around (available) to help give them a sense of how to get started. Schools (and many adults) introduce another barrier, which is a profound misunderstanding of what it means to be fluent in math and science (the misunderstanding is usually in the form of thinking that math and science are fact and pattern based, and that learning the facts and the patterns is what is required). I've used the " 'music appreciation' instead of 'music' " analogy for this misunderstanding.
Once we get some sense of what "the doing of math and science" is all about, the main question remaining is "for learners, what is the best balance between doing and being advised that should be set up?". This is pretty well understood for sports and music for both children and adults. As Tim Gallwey once said about teaching tennis: "the main problem with traditional tennis teaching is that the parts of your mind that learn to play tennis don't understand English!" (Of course he meant that a little English goes a long way, and a lot of English simply can't be translated into tennis action.)
It is almost certainly the case that different subject matters (and different learners) can tolerate more or less of direct instruction in English, so it is worthwhile to get a rough assessment of this when trying to invent a curriculum. However, I don't think it is controversial to state that learning to play music or tennis is really about lots of actual guided and coached (and uncoached) doing of the activities. Most mathematicians would agree about math learning, and most scientists would agree about science learning.
If we look at human history, we can see that "pure discovery" learning by children or adults usually results in weak ideas. On the other hand, rote learning usually doesn't work very well for any subject that has some art to it. (Playing lots of scales or memorizing chord progressions does not a musician make.)
So there has to be discovery and creativity of a sort, and this is done by good teachers and writers as a kind of "guided discovery" (sometimes by great environmental design as in classic Montessori education). Perhaps the most wonderful thing about human learning is that something that required a genius to invent or discover (like calculus) can very often be learned by non-geniuses if given help. One of the best accomplishments of the Etoys work over the years (and reaching back to Seymour) is that, while no 10 year old has ever invented calculus, we now know how to help most 10 year olds get fluent in a number of the most important ideas in calculus. This is real progress.
I think science is the most difficult of the "new thinking" to teach and learn because it is the farthest from normal commonsense perception and thinking. It is also the most critical of human reason because the nice crisp logic of math is only approximately mapped to considerations of the actual universe (it doesn't have to work like our current math or brains). So just what "doing science" should mean for children is not nearly as clear as for sports, music or math. I think that the "Galilean Gravity" project that is done so well by 5th graders is an excellent example of one of the "real science" activities children should be doing. But I would be surprised if it and projects like it are comprehensive enough to cover all that is needed. Part of the internalizing of the epistemology of science seems to come from so many examples from so many parts of science that show "the world is not as it seems", but also allow some pretty powerful generalizations to be drawn about many of the non-intuitive workings of the universe.
One of the paradoxes about many kinds of learning is that you can learn a lot about a subject by reading after you have learned the subject pretty well by lots of doing. But the subjects we've been discussing are not often (if ever) learned above threshold without lots of doing to provide a foundation of deep understanding for later listening and reading.
Cheers,
Alan
At 09:32 AM 11/21/2007, David Corking 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
- 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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