Constructivism

Constructivism is a set of assumptions about the nature of human learning that guide constructivist learning theories and teaching methods. Constructivism values developmentally appropriate, teacher-supported learning that is initiated and directed by the student.

History
This approach has not been widely valued in the past. This is due to the views that a play approach was seen as aimless, and of little importance. However, Jean Piaget did not agree with these traditional views. He saw play as an important and necessary part of the child's cognitive development and has even provided scientific evidence for his views.


 * Immanuel Kant 1724-1804
 * Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who strongly influenced modern educational theory through his book Emile: Or, On Education
 * John Dewey
 * Jerome Bruner

Failure to distinguish between a constructivist approach and maturationist views
Constructivist views are commonly mistaken with the views of maturationist. "The romantic maturationist stream is based on the idea that the child's naturally occurring development should be allowed to flower without adult interventions in a permissive environment" (DeVries et al., 2002). Whereas, the constructivist stream (or the cognitive-developmental stream) "is based on the idea that the dialectic or interactionist process of development and learning through the child's active construction should be facilitated and promoted by adults" (DeVries et al., 2002).

Constructivist theory
Formalization of the theory of constructivism is generally attributed to Jean Piaget, who articulated mechanisms by which knowledge is internalized by learners. He suggested that through processes of accommodation and assimilation, individuals construct new knowledge from their experiences. Assimilation occurs when individuals' experiences are aligned with their internal representation of the world. They assimilate the new experience into an already existing framework. Accommodation is the process of reframing one's mental representation of the external world to fit new experiences. Accommodation can be understood as the mechanism by which failure leads to learning. When we act on the expectation that the world operates in one way and it violates our expectations, we often fail. By accommodating this new experience and reframing our model of the way the world works, we learn from the experience of failure.

It is important to note that constructivism itself does not suggest one particular pedagogy. In fact, constructivism describes how learning happens, regardless of whether the learner is leveraging her experiences to understand a lecture or attempting to design a model airplane. In both cases, the theory of constructivism suggests that learners construct knowledge. Constructivism as a description of human cognition is often confused with pedagogic approaches that promote learning by doing.

Pedagogies based on constructivism
In fact, there are many pedagogies that leverage constructivist theory. Most approaches that have grown from constructivism suggest that learning is accomplished best using a hands-on approach. Learners learn by experimentation, and not by being told what will happen. They are left to make their own inferences, discoveries and conclusions. It also emphasizes that learning is not an "all or nothing" process but that students learn the new information that is presented to them by building upon knowledge that they already possess. It is therefore important that teachers constantly assess the knowledge their students have gained to make sure that the students perceptions of the new knowledge are what the teacher had intended. Teachers will find that since the students build upon already existing knowledge, when they are called upon to retrieve the new information, they may make errors. It is known as reconstruction error when we fill in the gaps of our understanding with logical, though incorrect, thoughts. Teachers need to catch and try to correct these errors, though it is inevitable that some reconstruction error will continue to occur because of our innate retrieval limitations.

In most pedagogies based on constructivism, the teacher's role is not only to observe and assess but to also engage with the children while they are completing activies, wondering aloud and posing question to the children for promotion of reasoning (DeVries et al., 2002). (ex: I wonder why the water does not spill over the edge of the full cup?) Teachers also intervene when there are conflicts that arise; however, they simply facilitate the children's resolutions and self-regulation, with an emphasis on the conflict being the children's and that they must figure things out for themselves. For example, promotion of literacy is accomplished by integrating the need to read and write throughout individual activities within print-rich classrooms. The teacher, after reading a story, encourages the children to write or draw stories of their own, or by having the children reenact a story that they may know well, both activities encourage the children to conceive themselves as reader and writers.

Specific approaches to education that are based on constructivism include:


 * constructionism
 * an approach to learning developed by Seymour Papert and his colleagues at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts


 * Papert eventually called his approach "constructionism." It included everything associated with Piaget's constructivism, but went beyond it to assert that constructivist learning happens especially well when people are engaged in constructing a product, something external to themselves such as a sand castle, a machine, a computer program or a book.


 * reciprocal learning
 * procedural facilitations for writing
 * cognitive tutors
 * Cognitively Guided Instruction
 * a research and teacher professional development program in elementary mathematics created by Thomas P. Carpenter, Elizabeth Fennema and their colleagues at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Its major premise is that teachers can use children's informal strategies (i.e., strategies children construct based on their understanding of everyday situations, such as losing marbles or picking flowers) as a primary basis for teaching mathematics in the elementary grades.

Social constructivism
In recent decades, constructivist theorists have extended the traditional focus on individual learning to address collaborative and social dimensions of learning.