Page 52 - Educational Technology A Primer for the 21st Century

40 2 Learning in the Context of Technologies
2.2.3 Constructivism

Constructivism emerged in the 1970s and 1980s as an extension of cognitivism that
included an emphasis on internal mental constructions and the influence of others
on an individual’s learning. The main ideas are based on the works of John Dewey
(1859–1952) and Lev Vygotsky (1896–1934).
Main ideas
Constructivism holds that learning is the process of constructing internal psycho-
logical representation in the process of the interaction with the environment.
Helping learners involves helping them to understand the nature, regularity, and the
inner connections among things (Chen & Liu, 2011). The basic elements of con-
structivism include context, collaboration, conversation, and meaning-making.

From constructivism, learning could be understood in the following ways.
(1) Learning is or should be learner-centered.
(2) Learning is the process by which learners construct internal psychological
representation actively.
(3) The learning process consists of two aspects: the reorganization and recon-
struction of old knowledge and the meaningful construction of new knowledge.
(4) Learning is not only an individualized behavior, but also a social and
language-centered behavior; learning requires communication and cooperation.
(5) Learning involves emphasizing the situation of learning and attaching impor-
tance to the creation of meaningful situations to support learning.
(6) Effective learning requires appropriate resources to support meaning
construction.

The impact on teaching
According to constructivism, teachers should not teach in the traditional way, but
should encourage students to cooperate or interact with peers. Students should
process information and construct meaning of knowledge actively, rather than listen
to teachers passively. The impact of constructivism on teaching is as follows:
(1) Pay attention to the design of learning scenario. The teacher should design
multi-dimensional learning scenarios, so that learners can understand the
concept of principles from various aspects, and then develop problem-solving,
decision-making, and innovation capabilities.
(2) Emphasize the learner’s active role. Focus on cultivating students’
self-management skills to stimulate the necessary psychological state and prior
knowledge for learning.
(3) Pay attention to the contribution of error concept to learning. Situated cog-
nition theory treats the aim and process as unity. Therefore, even the erroneous
concept being produced in the process of learning, it also has a positive
contribution to the construction of the whole knowledge structure.