But why would you take my word for anything? You have only read a handful of my blogs and probably only skimmed them at best. Let's look at what a professional has to say.
This is not the image of constructivism. Constructivism in education is a concept in which students come into the classroom with prior knowledge that must be questions and built upon in order for true learning to take place. But why would you take my word for anything? You have only read a handful of my blogs and probably only skimmed them at best. Let's look at what a professional has to say. In a 2007 article in "The Science Teacher" journal, Alan Colburn talks about how constructivism makes its way into the science classroom.Alan shows how constructivism in the classroom arises from Piaget and his views on how people learn. In using constructivism according to Piaget three things can occur: The information presented to the student will line up with their own prior knowledge and small amounts of learning can be made. Another possibility is that the information presented is not in agreement with the student's prior knowledge and they become too confused and unwilling to truly learn the subject. But the hope in teaching through constructivism, is that the student will be able to take information that does not completely agree with prior knowledge and, with the help of the teacher, accommodate the new information into what they already believe. This leads to the most long term learning, and Alan Colburn does a wonderful job in explaining constructivism and how to use it in the classroom.
7 Comments
Anna Capre
10/1/2015 08:46:50 am
I like how you address how a lot of people think students are empty vessels. How would you tie in constructivism into the classroom? It would be interesting to hear what the article said.
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Ryan
10/18/2015 04:23:14 pm
It would be interested to see what the article said...But that was the second part of the article that was not published yet. But to tie constructivism into the classroom you really need to make sure that students are accepting the new information to build off of.
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drann
10/3/2015 02:10:59 pm
You and Nikita selected the same article. Interesting in light of the 1000's of articles written on this important theory that drives science education today. Colburn does do a splendid job of describing constructivism. Like Anna said, how would you make it the bedrock of your teaching with specific examples?
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Nick B
10/4/2015 08:13:35 am
Several constructivist ideas align well with other educational ideas (as with any good system of understanding), in particular, the concept of: struggle for understanding must be placed at the optimum level for the student whom is struggling. The expected result of this is optimized learning for the student, also known as flow in other learning schemes. Flow has problems when scaled to a large class due to differing students requiring different amounts of struggle to flow. How could we as educators prevent or repair this problem through other constrctivist systems/ideas?
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Devon Smith
10/4/2015 04:45:28 pm
I enjoy how you contrasted constructivism with knowledge being poured into a student's mind, and you go on to say that constructivism has to do with changing students' preconceptions, however constructivism is more than simply breaking down misconceptions to build up new knowledge. How would you add on to this definition of constructivism?
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Ryan
10/18/2015 04:29:56 pm
Constructivism is the concept that we build our knowledge based off of applying new information to concepts and ideas that we knew before. So in taking that definition we can build off of the blog post for the full concept.
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Mary Beth
10/4/2015 09:39:02 pm
Great article! Hehehe. I was wondering about your comment on long term learning. Do you mean just the secondary group or by using constructivism in general?
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