EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY

Chapter 2, page 53

Problem 2.5 Designing instruction: Helping students remember important

ideas.

Using everything you have learned about memory, what instructional methods

would you use to help students learn and remember facts such as these:

A. The steel industry is concentrated in the Great Lakes States.

B. Light is needed for photosynthesis to occur.

Response: As you develop an answer, consider these questions:

1. Have you enabled the students to be as active as possible? If you have
   provided them information to help them remember (such as an explanation),
   could you step back and have them generate that information themselves?


2. Have you included integration strategies of some kind that link this
   information to long-term memory?


3. Have you used meaningful strategies that will form multiple retrieval paths?

CONSTRUCTIVISM

Constructivism is probably the single most influential theory of learning in contemporary education.
Constructivism asserts that students learn by actively building up ideas on their own. In other words,
students learn by actively thinking about ideas, developing their own interpretations of ideas, and inventing
their own ways of understanding what they are learning. Because each student is unique, students will
construct unique interpretations of what they are studying.
For example, when the teacher tells the students in Rachel’s class about lobsters, the students will
all interpret what she says somewhat differently. Each student will construct a somewhat different
understanding of lobsters and how lobsters eat, because they all have different prior ideas about lobsters.
One student who hears that “lobsters smell food with hairs on their legs” imagines hairy legs as on a dog,
because this student does not have a good understanding of lobster anatomy. Another envisions a creature
with six legs (rather than 10). Still another, who has read extensively about crustaceans, may develop
ideas about how lobsters taste food and eat that are even more complex and sophisticated than the teachers
ideas. Constructivists thus emphasize that each learner will understand new ideas in a unique way, and
that teachers can never expect all students to end up with the same ideas.

Constructivism stands in stark contrast to a discredited model of learning that nonetheless appears
to be held by many people: the transmissionist or banking model of learning (Freire, 1970; Maor &
Taylor, 1995). According to the transmissionist model, students are receptacles, and teachers pour
information into them. Students meekly receive the information and memorize it. Students are like banks,
passively storing the deposits made by the teacher. How does this work with our example of Rachel and
lobsters? The teacher has an understanding of how lobsters taste food in her own mind. She tells the
students what she knows. This information is neatly transported into her students, who then have an exact
copy of the teacher’s knowledge in their own minds. Constructivists say that such an outcome is
impossible.

Types of Constructivism

There is a vast array of different versions of constructivism (Archer et al., 2003; Matthews, 2000;
Phillips, 1995, October) and there is no one set of principles that all constructivists agree upon without
qualification. Nonetheless, constructivists can be divided into two broad camps depending on how much