Use of repertory grids in facilitating knowledge construction and reconstruction in geology

Abstract

This article describes a case study of the social construction of knowledge when undergraduate students are engaged in collaborative analysis of repertory grids produced by themselves and their instructor. The research is based on the elicitation of students' private understanding and instructors' public knowledge with the use of the repertory grid. This technique is derived from Kelly's personal construct psychology (Kelly, 1955), a constructivist theory that emphasizes the idiosyncratic nature of meaning. The teaching experience that follows was conducted adopting the educational paradigm of self-organized learning, in which the principles of constructivism, conceptual change, personal construct psychology, public knowledge and private understanding, and social learning are integrated to some extent. Results indicate that the repertory grid technique is (a) an approach that motivates students to be responsible for their own learning; (b) one means to get students to communicate their understanding and make this understanding open for inspection and scrutiny; (c) a way to negotiate the meanings of the concepts under study; (d) a tool to match students' understanding with their instructor's knowledge; and (e) a way for students to structure their knowledge. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.