Keywords

Introduction

For nearly 50 years, constructivist theory has been making a significant contribution to education, shaping the way we think about the active role of the mind of the learner, whether student, teacher, or researcher. But to answer the question “what is constructivism?” is not an easy task; it depends on which version of constructivist theory we are asking about. There are many versions of constructivism in the literature, with labels such as cognitive, personal, social, radical, cultural, trivial, pedagogical, academic, contextual, C1 and C2, and ecological. And there are also allied terms that have a strong family resemblance, including social constructionism, enactivism and pragmatism. For this entry, I consider four versions – personal constructivism, radical constructivism, social constructivism, and critical constructivism. These have had a major impact on science education and greater impacts than other forms/versions. I start with a brief consideration of Piaget’s cognitive constructivism, which laid the foundations for the emergence of the “Big Four,” and I conclude with an integral perspective on using different versions of constructivism to shape science teaching and learning.

Cognitive Constructivism

By the second half of the twentieth century, science educators had begun to move away from behaviorist theories of learning, especially classical stimulus–response conditioning which was criticized for shaping teaching approaches that privilege learning by memorization and rote recall. The successor to behaviorism was the cognitive constructivism of Jean Piaget, in particular his theory of mental operations and age-related developmental stages of reasoning (from the concrete operational reasoning of early childhood to formal reasoning of the mature adult mind). Piaget’s ideas persuaded science educators to take account of the active “constructing” mind of the individual student which had been largely overlooked by the dominant teaching method of lecturing to silent classrooms. Teachers began to reevaluate their established practice of “transmitting” knowledge to the seemingly empty minds of students, realizing that students’ failure to learn meaningfully could not necessarily be overcome simply by lecturing more slowly or more forcefully. A radical shift in pedagogical perspective from didactic teaching inputs to students’ meaningful learning experiences formed the basis of the constructivist revolution in science education.

Personal Constructivism

Based on research in the 1970s/1980s on “children’s ideas” by leading science educators such as Rosalind Driver, personal constructivism captured the imagination of science educators worldwide and led to an ongoing and fruitful program of research into students’ conceptions of the physical world. Researchers discovered that students’ intuitive understandings of their experiences are so strongly held that in many cases they block development of counterintuitive scientific concepts. For example, the child’s experience of applying a constant force to the pedals of a bicycle to maintain constant speed is very often seen by the child as completely contrary to Newtonian dynamics which holds that constant force applied to a point mass on a frictionless surface yields accelerated motion. In the past 30 years, almost every topic in the science curriculum has been researched to identify sources of potential student misconceptions. As a remedy, researchers developed “conceptual change” teaching strategies that enable students to experience dissatisfaction with their naïve understandings and to experience the “intelligibility, plausibility, and fruitfulness” of scientific replacement concepts, aided by metacognitive strategies for reflecting on the meaningfulness of their new knowledge.

Personal constructivism drew on the personal construct theory of two cognitive psychologists. George Kelly’s personal construct psychology emphasizes the role of “personal construction” in the development of both scientific community knowledge and children’s attempts to make sense of their experiences of the world. David Ausubel’s theory of cognitive learning argues that meaningful learning involves building on learners’ prior knowledge or existing mental constructs. Both models of learning focus on concept development rather than on Piaget’s generalized cognitive structures or “content-independent” forms of thought.

The popularity of personal constructivism owes much to its neat fit with the content of science curricula, providing prescriptive means for teaching more effectively the knowledge base of school science. In the hands of science educators, personal constructivism has inspired a range of research and teaching methods for monitoring students’ conceptual profiles and facilitating the process of meaningful learning, especially by means of inducing cognitive conflict. Well-known methods include “concept mapping,” “interview about instances and events,” “predict-observe-explain,” and “two-tier diagnostic tests.”

However, controversy surrounds the term “misconceptions,” with many arguing that it is not a good constructivist teaching practice to regard as misconceived (i.e., wrong) students’ intuitive conceptions when they do not accord with canonical science. A deficit view of students’ prior knowledge can lead to a didactic teaching approach in which the teacher’s knowledge is imposed on the basis of his/her authority, eliciting little more than rote learning and social conformity among students. A preferred term is the more respectful “alternative frameworks.” Controversy also surrounds the constructivist agenda of conceptual change when it is used as an “ideology replacement therapy” for students whose worldviews do not necessarily accord with the Western modern worldview, especially children of indigenous populations (see critical constructivism below for more on this issue).

Radical Constructivism

Ernst von Glasersfeld’s radical constructivism was thrust into the limelight by science educators dissatisfied with the objectivism of personal constructivist pedagogy, where objectivism entails a naïve realist “correspondence theory” of truth, which regards scientific knowledge as an accurate depiction of physical reality. Radical constructivism draws on Piaget’s lesser known background theory of “genetic epistemology” which emphasizes the inherent uncertainty of the constructed knowledge of the world by all cognizing beings, from children to scientists. According to the defining principle of radical constructivism, cognition serves an adaptive purpose inasmuch as it organizes our experience of the world, rather than enables us to “discover” an objective ontological reality. This is not to deny the existence of external reality, a world of physical things that we can sense, just that we cannot peer around our conceptual frameworks and see it directly in an unmediated or pure sense. Furthermore, from a proof-of-concept perspective, we do not have access to an objective “God’s eye” standpoint from which to judge the match between the so-called essence of external reality and our cognitive constructions. We are, therefore, restricted to “dancing” with the shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave, the shadows of our own taken-as-shared experiential realities. Thus, our knowledge can only be judged in terms of its “viability,” or fitness, for representing or modeling the physical world. For radical constructivism, the cornerstone concept of “objectivity” is reconceptualized as consensual agreement by scientific communities of practice. This instrumentalist perspective on knowledge production and legitimation is in close accord with David Bloor’s “strong program” of the sociology of science knowledge (SSK) and with the philosophy of science of Thomas Kuhn who argued persuasively that scientific knowledge is “paradigm bound.”

Radical constructivism directs science educators to facilitate students’ epistemological understanding of the nature of science, especially the inherent uncertainty and confidence limits of scientific knowledge. A legacy of earlier science education is the naïve view that science generates absolute truths about the workings of the physical universe. As a result, many “well-educated” people reject the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report (IPCC 2013) that climate change is human induced. The skeptics are not happy with a finding (i.e., consensus by the scientific community) that is expressed “only” at the 95 % level of probability. This public controversy raises the question of how well science education enables students to understand the social and cognitive processes of scientific modeling. It also raises the question of how well science education enables students to understand the epistemological status of scientific concepts, theories, and laws (and to be able to differentiate between them). A naïve belief in the permanence and immutability of scientific knowledge can breed arrogance among “true believers” that debate with the skeptics is unnecessary; it is not uncommon to hear science educators claim, for example, that Darwin’s theory of evolution is unassailably right and creation science is simply wrong, end of story! The tendency of science education to reproduce the ideology of “scientism” has been challenged by critical constructivism.

Within the science education constructivist movement, a “paradigm battle” between radical and personal constructivists broke out, with vociferous opposition evident in international conferences. Radical constructivists labeled (somewhat pejoratively) the objectivist standpoint of personal constructivists as “trivial constructivism,” with the latter countering that the idealism of radical constructivism leads to rampant relativism. This battle was part of the larger war in educational research between the opposing epistemological armies of positivism, with its quantitative epistemology of objectivism, and interpretivism, with its qualitative epistemology of social constructivism. Another critical view of radical constructivism, articulated by social constructionism, is that it perpetuates the subject-object dualism of subjective idealism, rendering the individual mind as primary and failing to explain adequately the intersubjectivity of the social world.

Radical constructivism does not stand alone as a theory of learning; it works best in conjunction with social constructivism to support inquiry learning.

Social Constructivism

Social constructivism entered the pedagogical arena drawing on theories of social psychology such as the “socially situated cognition” of Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, which recognizes that people co-construct meaningful knowledge in communities of practice, and the “social activity theory” of Lev Vygotsky, which identifies the essential co-development of language and thought. Social constructivism extends the “psychologistic” focus on the mind of the individual learner of both personal constructivism and radical constructivism, recognizing that learning is also a social process. A social constructivist perspective directs teachers to situate learning activities in the context of students’ out-of-school lives, thereby enhancing the meaningfulness of learning science. Applying science to contexts that are familiar to students, such as testing water quality in a nearby river or monitoring energy use within the home, gives science a perceived relevance that is often missing when it is confined to the school laboratory or textbook.

In the 1990s, pioneering mathematics educators Grayson Wheatley and Paul Cobb developed pedagogies of problem-centered learning and inquiry mathematics, respectively, based on the principles of radical and social constructivism. What these approaches have in common is a perspective that students should be engaged in learning environments that allow rich inquiry-based dialogue within small groups and at the whole-class level, facilitated by the teacher. Students learn to construct explanations and justifications of their reasoning, share and negotiate with other students and the teacher, and develop the patterns of discourse of a community of mathematicians. For the teacher, eliciting students’ multiple solution methods is more important than students obtaining “the correct answer” by following (robotically) a standard procedure. The teacher exercises his/her authority to legitimate students’ solution strategies and does so indirectly by stimulating students to reflect critically on their assumptions and chains of reasoning.

For science education, social constructivism emphasizes the importance of engaging students in classroom discourse in order to develop the “social capital” of science (i.e., values, knowledge, skills, language), especially scientific ways of reasoning and negotiating to reach consensus in a community of practice. Engaging in discussion, whether it be teacher-directed whole-class question-and-answer or student-directed small-group work, gives students opportunities to put language to their ideas and test their viability against the ideas of other students. Peer learning is a powerful socializing process, involving a strong emotional relationship with significant others. Contributing actively to classroom discussion or listening actively to other students’ questions and responses can help develop the metacognitive skill of reflective thinking (i.e., thinking about one’s own thinking) which is an important step towards developing an ability to assess the viability of one’s own prior knowledge and developing concepts. In collaborative learning, especially in small groups, students have opportunities to develop social inquiry skills, including active and empathic listening, learning to “take turns” in speaking, offering strategies for investigating a problem or issue, and negotiating a consensual solution or conclusion to their scientific inquiries.

The invisible frameworks that restrain teachers from creating vibrant social learning environments gave rise to critical constructivism.

Critical Constructivism

The next articulation of constructivist theory involved an extension into the cultural-political realm. Science educators sensitive to issues of social justice, such as Joe Kincheloe, were inspired by various social theories, including Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s theory of the “social construction of reality,” Jurgen Habermas’ critical social theory of “knowledge-constitutive interests,” and Paulo Freire’s “pedagogy of the oppressed.” These social philosophers explained how the construction of socially sanctioned knowledge, such as science, is framed by powerfully invisible (i.e., hegemonic) value systems embedded in society’s social structures that serve the interests of dominant sectors of society while disenfranchising others. From this perspective, science is a cultural activity, rather than being transcendental of culture, and thus, many sciences exist around the world, grounded in a variety of communities of practice (e.g., Masakata Ogawa’s “multi-sciences perspective”). Critical constructivists argue that science educators, blind to this perspective, perpetuate oppressive ideologies lurking (like Trojan horses) in science curricula and assessment systems. By means of politically naive teaching methods, such as a narrowly conceived conceptual change approach, science teachers inject (unwittingly) into students’ “cultural DNA” distorting ideologies such as scientism, masculinism, and Western imperialism. Cultural anthropologists describe this process of socialization as “enculturation” or “one-way cultural border crossing.”

From a critical constructivist perspective, Western modern science is but one form of science, albeit the dominant form, that thrives in concert with modern technological developments and capitalist market economies to fuel twenty-first-century globalization. For postcolonial scholars, the culturally blind, one-size-fits-all Western modern science curriculum export industry is tantamount to neocolonialism. Although studies of the cultural history of science reveal that Western modern science owes much to earlier developments in Africa, China, Japan, India, Persia, and Arabia, little of this history is included in science curricula. Critical constructivism recognizes that science learning is situated in a cultural context of historical and political considerations. The science learner’s construction of his/her social capital is recognized as a complex intercultural process involving the reconstruction of children’s cultural identities. If science education is to become culturally inclusive, in a global sense, it cannot afford to ignore the potential “collisions” between the starkly contrasting worldviews of Western modern science and culturally different others. The mutually beneficial process of “acculturation,” or intercultural borrowing, should not be left to chance.

Critical constructivism points out that science educators are deeply implicated in values education inasmuch as they are preparing future citizens to participate in their societies, not only as professional scientists, engineers, and mathematicians but also as community-minded citizens who have a stakeholding in the survival of the life-support system of the planet. It is essential, therefore, that we enable science students to develop higher-level abilities (e.g., Derek Hodson’s “critical scientific literacy”) such as critical reflective thinking, communicative competence, and a social conscience. These abilities and habits of mind are essential for participating in social decision-making about the ethical use of innovations in Western modern science and technology for resolving global crises such as climate change, pollution of the means of supporting life, loss of biocultural diversity, and so on, much of which has resulted from humanity’s past misuse of science and its technological products. Critical constructivism calls for “socially responsible” science education.

An Integral Perspective

As science educators, how do we resolve these philosophically and politically contrasting views of constructivist theory? And how do we avoid turning constructivist theory into yet another privileged ideology that restricts science educators’ evolving theories of teaching and learning? What is clear from this short history of constructivism in science education is its adaptability to a range of agendas driven by a variety of interdisciplinary interests. What emerges is an image not of a many-headed monster threatening the unwary (the Hydra of Greek mythology) but a multidimensional hologram that integrates a range of discrete images into a coherent and complex whole (for more on this, see Steffe and Gale 1995). To change metaphors, we can choose to be like the proverbial blind men and the elephant, each one identifying only one part of the whole, or we can choose to embrace the whole, making use of powerful synergies as we integrate the parts.

The power and adaptability of constructivist theory lies in its central metaphor – constructed knowing – which enables us to see ourselves as dynamic professionals undergoing constant reconstruction as we embrace and test the viability of diverse ideas. Dialectical reasoning is the catalyst that enables us to hold together in creative tension these competing and contradictory ideas, thereby immeasurably enriching our professional repertoires (e.g., Willison and Taylor 2006). But this is not to say that multidimensional, or integral, constructivism is the only game in town. Clearly there are a host of other theories about teaching and learning, including behaviorism, that are available to us now or that will emerge in the future. From a dialectical perspective, these too can be integrated into our ever-expanding repertoires.

As science teachers, at times it might make good sense to engage students in memorization and rote recall, and at other times, we might want to correct a common student misconception or enhance students’ epistemological understanding of the nature of science or direct students to explore collaboratively indigenous knowledge systems or investigate the historical roots of contemporary scientific theories; and we might want to engage students in debate or role play or theater production or community projects and so on. All of this is possible; nothing is excluded by virtue of ideological conflict. The critical factor in choosing a teaching and learning strategy should be the professional judgment of the epistemologically astute science teacher as to which theory of knowing (or epistemology) is most appropriate for achieving a particular curriculum goal at a particular point in time.

As the past 50 years has shown, constructivist theory is adaptable to many science teaching and learning scenarios, not in a simplistic sense as a method of teaching and learning but, as explained by Tobin and Tippins (1993), as a powerful epistemological “referent” that enables teachers to think creatively about how to make learning science more motivating, memorable, and meaningful, no matter the number or mix of students or the quality of available resources or the constraints of the curriculum and examination system. If the challenge of engaging students in deeply meaningful learning seems too great for science education alone, then interdisciplinary collaboration offers an exciting pathway for school-based development and implementation of integrated curricula.

Cross-References