Constructivism

Last Week: Cognitivism

We will recall that there is a great deal of ambiguity in the education literature as to what constitutes Cognitivism, and how it different from Constructivism

And that we are viewing things as...

ConstructivismCognitive

ConstructivismCognitivism Proto-Cognitivism

Last Week: Cognitivism

Cognitive Constructivism


Cognitive Constructivism emphasises two points: Learning is an active process Learning should be whole, authentic,

and “real”


Learning is an active process Direct experience, making errors, and looking for

solutions are vital for the assimilation and accommodation of information.

How information is presented is important. When information is introduced as an aid to problem

solving, it functions as a tool rather than an isolated arbitrary fact.


Learning should be whole, authentic, and “real” Piaget helps us to understand that meaning is

constructed as children interact in meaningful ways with the world around them.

Thus, That means less emphasis on isolated "skill" exercises that try to teach something like long division or end of sentence punctuation.

Students still learn these things in cognitive constructivist classrooms, but they are more likely to learn them if they are engaged in meaningful activities (such as operating a class "store" or "bank" or writing and editing a class newspaper).

Jerome Seymour Bruner

Born October 1, 1915 Age 94 Born in New York, New

York cognitive psychologist

and educational psychologist

Scaffolding Theory Spiral Curriculum

Theory of Instruction

Learning is an active process in which learners constructs new ideas or concepts based upon their current/past knowledge.

The learner selects and transforms information, constructs hypotheses, and makes decisions, relying on a cognitive structure to do so.

Cognitive structure (i.e., schema, mental models) provides meaning and organization to experiences and allows the individual to "go beyond the information given".

Theory of Instruction

As far as instruction is concerned, the instructor should try and encourage students to discover principles by themselves.

The instructor and student should engage in an active dialog (i.e., Socratic learning).

The task of the instructor is to translate information to be learned into a format appropriate to the learner's current state of understanding.

Curriculum should be organized in a spiral manner so that the student continually builds upon what they have already learned.

Scaffolding Theory

He used the term to describe young children's oral language acquisition. Helped by their parents when they first start learning to speak, young children are provided with instinctive structures to learn a language. Bed-time stories and read alouds are classic examples

Spiral Curriculum

Instead of focusing for relatively long periods of time on specific narrow topics, a spiral curriculum tries to expose students to a wide varies of ideas over and over ago.

Born 9 August 1896 Died 16 Sept 1980 Born in Neuchâtel,

Switzerland Swiss psychologist and

philosopher He laid great

importance to the education of children

Jean Piaget

Key Ideas

Schemas – categories of knowledge Assimilation - adding to an existing

schema Accommodation - changing an existing

schema Equilibration - balancing between

assimilation and accommodation

Key Ideas: Schemas (1/2)

Schemas – categories of knowledge A schema describes both the mental and physical

actions involved in understanding and knowing. Schemas are categories of knowledge that help us to

interpret and understand the world. In Piaget's view, a schema includes both a category of

knowledge and the process of obtaining that knowledge. As experiences happen, this new information is used to

modify, add to, or change previously existing schemas.

Key Ideas: Schemas (2/2)

Schemas – categories of knowledge For example, a child may have a schema about a type of

animal, such as a dog. If the child's sole experience has been with small dogs, a

child might believe that all dogs are small, furry, and have four legs.

Suppose then that the child encounters a very large dog. The child will take in this new information, modifying the

previously existing schema to include this new information.

Key Ideas: Assimilation

Assimilation - adding to an existing schema The process of taking in new information into our

previously existing schema’s is known as assimilation. The process is somewhat subjective, because we tend

to modify experience or information somewhat to fit in with our pre-existing beliefs.

In the example above, seeing a dog and labelling it "dog" is an example of assimilating the animal into the child's dog schema.

Key Ideas: Accommodation

Accommodation - changing an existing schema Another part of adaptation involves changing or altering

our existing schemas in light of new information, a process known as accommodation.

Accommodation involves altering existing schemas, or ideas, as a result of new information or new experiences.

New schemas may also be developed during this process.

Key Ideas: Equilibration

Equilibration - balancing between assimilation and accommodation

Piaget believed that all children try to strike a balance between assimilation and accommodation, which is achieved through a mechanism Piaget called equilibration.

As children progress through the stages of cognitive development, it is important to maintain a balance between applying previous knowledge (assimilation) and changing behaviour to account for new knowledge (accommodation).

Equilibration helps explain how children are able to move from one stage of thought into the next.

The four development stages

0-2years

2-7 years

7-12 years

over 12years

Sensorimotor PreoperationalConcrete

Operational

FormalOperationa

l


Sensorimotor Stage From birth to age 2. Children experience the world through

movement and senses (use five senses to explore the world).

During the sensorimotor stage children are extremely egocentric, meaning they cannot perceive the world from others' viewpoints.


Preoperational Stage From ages 2 to 7. Magical thinking predominates (The child applies

unwarranted weight to coincidence and often includes such ideas as the ability of the mind to affect the physical world).

Acquisition of motor skills. Egocentrism begins strongly and then weakens. Children cannot conserve or use logical thinking.


Concrete Operational Stage From ages 7 to 12. Children begin to think logically but are very

concrete in their thinking. Children can now conceive and think logically

but only with practical aids. They are no longer egocentric.


Formal Operational Stage From age 12 onwards. Development of abstract reasoning. Children develop abstract thought and can

easily conserve and think logically in their mind.

Other forms of Constructivism

Constructivism

Social Constructivism

Social Constructivism encourages the learner to arrive at his or her version of the truth, influenced by his or her background, culture or embedded worldview.

Historical developments and symbol systems, such as language, logic, and mathematical systems, are inherited by the learner as a member of a particular culture and these are learned throughout the learner's life.

This also stresses the importance of the nature of the learner's social interaction with knowledgeable members of the society.

Lev Vygotsky

Born Nov 17 1896 Died June 11, 1934 Bron in Orsha, in the

Russian Empire (today in Belarus).

a Soviet psychologist and the founder of cultural-historical psychology.

Cultural Mediation and Internalization

Vygotsky investigated child development and how this was guided by the role of culture and interpersonal communication.

He observed how higher mental functions developed historically within particular cultural groups, as well as individually through social interactions with significant people in a child's life, particularly parents, but also other adults.

Cultural Mediation and Internalization

Through these interactions, a child came to learn the habits of mind of her/his culture, including speech patterns, written language, and other symbolic knowledge through which the child derives meaning and which affected a child's construction of her/his knowledge.

This key premise of Vygotskian psychology is often referred to as cultural mediation.

Psychology of Play

Vygotsky's also undertook a great deal of research on play, or children's games, as a psychological phenomenon and its role in the child's development.

Through play the child develops abstract meaning separate from the objects in the world, which is a critical feature in the development of higher mental functions.

Zone of Proximal Development Vygotsky’s term for the range of

tasks that are too difficult for the child to master alone but that can be learned with guidance and assistance of adults or more-skilled children.

The lower limit of ZPD is the level of skill reached by the child working independently.

The upper limit is the level of additional responsibility the child can accept with the assistance of an able instructor.

Scaffolding is changing the level of support. Over the course of a teaching session, a more-skilled person adjusts the amount of guidance to fit the child’s current performance

John Dewey

Born Oct 20, 1859 Died June 1, 1952 Born in Burlington,

Vermont Philosopher,

psychologist, and educational reformer

Very influential to education and social reform

The Reflex Arc Concept In Dewey's article "The Reflex Arc

Concept in Psychology" which appeared in Psychological Review in 1896, he reasons against the traditional stimulus-response understanding of the reflex arc in favor of a "circular" account in which what serves as "stimulus" and what as "response" depends on how one considers the situation.

While he does not deny the existence of stimulus, sensation, and response, he disagreed that they were separate, juxtaposed events happening like links in a chain.

He developed the idea that there is a coordination by which the stimulation is enriched by the results of previous experiences.

Reflective Thinking

Reflection as a meaning-making process;1. Moves the learner from one experience to the

next with deeper understanding of its relationships with and connections to other experiences and ideas.

2. The thread that makes continuity of learning possible.

3. It insures the progress of the individual, and, ultimately, society.

4. It is a means to essentially moral ends.

Experiential Learning Model

On Education

Dewey was an educational reformer, who emphasized that the traditional teaching's concern with delivering knowledge needed to be balanced with a much greater concern with the students' actual experiences and active learning.

At the same time, Dewey was alarmed by many of the "child-centered" excesses of educational-school pedagogues who claimed to be his followers. In How We Think, Dewey wrote;

“The older type of instruction tended to treat the teacher as a dictatorial ruler. The newer type sometimes treats the teacher as a negligible factor, almost as an evil, though a necessary one. In reality, the teacher is the intellectual leader of a social group, He is a leader, not in virtue of official position, but because of wider and deeper knowledge and matured experience. The supposition that the teacher must abdicate its leadership is merely silly.”

Maria Montessori

Born August 31, 1870 Died May 6, 1952 Born in Chiaravalle

(Ancona), Italy Physician, educator,

philosopher, humanitarian and devout Catholic

best known for her philosophy and the Montessori method of education of children from birth to adolescence

Montessori Method

an educational approach where children are given freedom in an environment prepared with materials designed for their self-directed learning activity.

The purpose of which is to bring about, sustain and support children’s true natural way of being ("the child's true normal nature").

The Three-Period Lesson

Period 1 consists of providing the child with the name of the material. In the case of letter sounds, the teacher will have the child trace the letter and say, "This is u. This is p." This provides the children with the name of what they are learning.

Period 2 is to help the child recognize the different objects. Most of the time with the three-period lesson is in period 2. Some things the teacher might say are, "Show me the u. Show me the p” or "Point to the u. Point to the p.” After spending some time in the second period, the child may move on to period 3.

Period 3 involves checking to see if the child not only recognizes the name of the material, but is able to tell you what it is. The teacher will point to the "u" and ask the student, "What is this?" If the child replies with, "uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu", the child fully understands it. With letters, the lesson finally ends with the child blending the letters to make a simple word, such as “up.”

Planes of Development

over 18years

The FirstPlane

0-6 years

6-12 years

12-18 years

The SecondPlane

The ThirdPlane

The FourthPlane


The First Plane Ages 0 - 6 years. This involves basic personality formation and

learning through physical senses. During this plane, children experience sensitive

periods for acquiring language and developing basic mental order.


The Second Plane Ages 6 - 12 years. This involves learning through abstract

reasoning, developing through a sensitivity for imagination and social interaction with others.


The Third Plane Ages 12 – 18 years. This is the period of adolescent growth, involving

the significant biological changes of puberty, moving towards learning a valuation of the human personality, especially as related to experiences in the surrounding community.


The Fourth Plane Over 18 years old. This involves a completion of all remaining

development in the process of maturing in adult society.

In America

After the 1907 establishment of Montessori's first school in Rome, by 1917 there was an intense interest in her method in America in large part due to the publication of a small booklet entitled "The Montessori System Examined" by William Heard Kilpatrick - a follower of John Dewey.

Confusion and conflict about the method's philosophy emerged with particular intensity in the modern development of Montessori in the United States where, in 1967, the name "Montessori" was held to be a "generic term" that no organization could claim for its own exclusive use. Since then, the number and diversity of Montessori organizations and philosophies have expanded considerably.

That’s it, thanks.

Constructivism

Education

Transcript of Constructivism