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Constructivist Theory ... |
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2 Different Learning Styles
Constructivist Theory
Personal Constructs
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Constructivism is the label given to a set of theories about
learning which fall somewhere between cognitive and humanistic
views. If behaviorism treats the organism as a black box,
cognitive theory recognizes the importance of the mind in making
sense of the material with which it is presented. Nevertheless,
it still presupposes that the role of the learner is primarily
to assimilate whatever the teacher presents. Constructivism — in
its "social" forms — suggests that the learner is much more
actively involved in a joint enterprise with the teacher of
creating new meanings. So we can distinguish between "cognitive
constructivism" which is about how the individual learner
understands things, and "social constructivism", which
emphasizes how meanings and understandings grow out of social
encounters—see Vygotsky below. In this sense,
conversational theories of learning fit into the
constructivist framework. The emphasis is on the learner as an
active "maker of meanings". The role of the teacher is to enter
into a dialogue with the learner, trying to understand the
meaning of the material to be learned to that learner, and to
help her or him to refine their understanding until it
corresponds with that of the teacher.
One strand of constructivism may be traced to the writings of
John
Dewey, who emphasized the place of experience in education.
Another starts from the work of
Piaget, who
demonstrated empirically that children’s minds were not empty,
but actively processed the material with which they were
presented, and postulated the mechanisms of
accommodation
and assimilation
as key to this processing.
But the most significant base of a social
constructivist theory were laid down by
Vygotsky [1896-1934] (1962), in his theory of the Zone of
Proximal Development (ZPD). He observed that when children were
tested on tasks on their own, they rarely did as well as when
they were working in collaboration with an adult. It was by no
means always the case that the adult was teaching them how to
perform the task, but that the process of engagement with the
adult enabled them to refine their thinking or their performance
to make it more effective. (See
Daniels (1996) for an introduction to Vygotsky.)
Original content updated and hosted at
www.learningandteaching.info/learning/
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