Constructivist Pedagogy Research Articles

Determination of Teacher Characteristics which Support Constructivist Learning Environments

Problem Statement: Exploring the variables that affect teachers’ teaching approaches in learning environments is crucial to determining their response to new trends. Their teaching and learning characteristics set the success level of the new reforms. In addition, monitoring the usage of constructivist pedagogies and giving feedback about them are other crucial aims of this research. Purpose of the Study: The purpose of this study was to identify the characteristics of primary school teachers that helped them prepare constructivist learning environments. Method: The data were collected through the Constructivist Learning Environment Questionnaire (CLEQ) and a modified version of Draw a Classroom Teacher Test Checklist (DACTT-C), which is a modified version of the Draw a Science Teacher Test Checklist (DASTT-C). The sample of the study was 115 primary school teachers from schools in Afyon, Turkey. Convenience sampling was used as a sampling strategy. Findings: The results of the study showed that the gender of primary school teachers was not a factor in determining the constructivist characteristics of the primary school, and less experienced primary school teachers were more willing to use constructivist principles in their primary school. The primary school teachers’ drawings were analyzed qualitatively. There were 15 missing drawings in the survey, so researchers scored and evaluated only 100 drawings. Only eight primary school teachers’ drawings (8%) reflected a student-centered teaching style; 56% had both student and teacher-centered characteristics; and 36% were teacher-centered. Two of the eight student-centered drawings belonged to males and four of the eight drawings belonged to teachers with 0 to 5 years of experience. Three of the eight student-centered drawings belonged to teachers with a master’s degree and five belonged to teachers with a bachelor degree. Conclusion and Recommendations: Primary school teachers who had graduate degrees were more open to using constructivist characteristics in teaching and learning. Females and less experienced primary school teachers had a higher tendency to draw student-centered instructional characteristics. Turkish teachers are mostly in a transition process from teacher-centered instruction to student-centered instruction. The Ministry of National Education should promote collaboration between senior and novice teachers. Primary school teachers should be supported with pre-service and in-service training programs during the transition process of teacher-centered teaching to a student-centered teaching style. For further research, primary school teachers’ perceptions about constructivist learning environments should be observed in the primary school environment. Keywords: constructivist learning environments, primary school teachers, teacher characteristics, draw a classroom teacher test checklist, primary school drawings.

Possibilities for Motivation in Hard Sciences Teaching

This paper focuses on the relevance and importance of motivation in one of the subject of hard sciences namely mathematics in the context of lifelong learning. The introduction identifies and summarises basic theoretical issues of motivation: a definition from the perspective of psychology and education, the basic divisions and different approaches used to motivate children and adults. There is a description of the pitfalls and difficulties in motivating students in mathematics, as encountered by teachers in educational practice. Paper presents the results of undertaken research at elementary school. Finally it also explores possible solutions in teaching methods which use pedagogical constructivism, a tool used to increase students’ attention and to provide motivation within mathematics teaching.

Los procesos pedagógicos administrativos y los aspectos socio-culturales de inclusión y tecno-pedagogía a través de las tendencias pedagógicas en educación a distancia y virtual

El presente artículo de revisión se enfoca en el estudio y análisis de las tendencias pedagógicas en Educación a Distancia y Virtual como parte de una tesis doctoral. Los hallazgos indican tendencias pedagógicas que se integran a procesos pedagógicos administrativos, en donde surge la tecno-pedagogía, la pedagogía digital y los procesos tradicionales de las tendencias conductistas, cognitivistas, constructivistas y humanistas. Todas estas situadas en contextos educativos diversos con particularidades propias de las mediaciones tecnológicas y comunicacionales. Igualmente se observan las tendencias pedagógicas cognitivista y constructivista en donde el aprendizaje autónomo se identifica como característica común en la Educación a Distancia, aunado a pedagogías instruccionales, constructivistas y humanistas como parte de los lineamientos propios de la calidad educativa en esta modalidad formativa.

Intentional Work Group Experiences: A Pedagogical Tool for Counselor Educators

Work groups “promote efficient and effective accomplishment of group tasks among people who are gathered to accomplish group goals” (ASGW, 2000, p. 3). Due to the prevalence of use in actual counseling settings, counselor educators frequently use work groups as a pedagogical tool in educating counselors-in-training. This article introduces a classroom intervention designed to help counseling students develop self-awareness and skills pertaining to participating in work groups. Using constructivist pedagogy as our theoretical basis we will describe the intervention and the qualitative approach we incorporated to evaluate the intervention’s impact in the classroom. Results and discussion including contextualization, limitations, implications, and suggestions for future research will follow in the remainder of this article. Author's Notes Correspondence concerning this article should be sent to Brian Hutchison at hutchisonbr@umsl.edu

Shifting from classic learning environment to digital learning environment in Arab culture

Social media discussion forums, blogs, wikis and three-dimensional virtual worlds are the current new techniques for learning. External social media sites, including Facebook (Facebook, Inc., Menlo Park, CA, USA), YouTube (YouTube, LLC, San Bruno, CA, USA), Wikipedia (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., San Francisco, CA, USA), Flickr (Yahoo Inc., Sunnyvale, CA, USA), Twitter (Twitter, Inc., San Francisco, CA, USA), LinkedIn (LinkedIn, Mountain View, CA, USA) and Second Life (Linden Lab, San Francisco, CA, USA), have been considered as very useful learning and teaching tools in recent years. This provides a chance for student-centred and social constructivist pedagogies in an online environment, and enables students to easily contribute and collaborate to e-learning environments. The influences of social media have reached Arab culture and are quickly spreading. This study highlights the use of these media for self-directed learning (SDL) purposes among medical students. This is a cross-sectional study and the questionnaire was constructed using the Delphi technique at Google (Google Inc., Mountain View, CA, USA) documents and was uploaded to different social media sites. The questionnaire comprised 28 questions, which included information relating to demographic features and utilization of social media during SDL time. The data were entered into Statistical Product and Service Solutions (SPSS) version 21 (IBM Corporation, Armonk, NY, USA) and Pearson chi-squared tests were applied for comparison. We received a total of 103 responses in 1 week, 52 of which (50.5%) were from men. The greatest proportion of responses came from students in their fifth year (35%), followed by those in their fourth year and first year (18.4%). Most students (63%) scored a grade-point average of 4–5 points. Out of the total, only eight students (7.8%) responded that they do not use social network sites at all. Almost one-third of responders (33%) utilized social networks for SDL for 2–3 hours daily, and 84 responders (81%) declared that these social media sites are helpful during preparation for their examinations. Age, sex and academic year have a significant association ( P <0.05) with the use of social media. In conclusion, it is reported that the culture of using of social media is increasing in Arab society; however, we need to provide the guidance for its proper utilization for SDL purposes.

Constructivism: A Paradigm for Teaching and Learning

The present paper is a conceptual paper focusing on the need and ways of adopting constructivism in the teaching and learning process. Our present education system emphasizes on preparing students for highly competitive standardized tests and overlooks the importance of fostering critical thinking skills in our students. The conventional teacher centric teaching learning process emphasizing on memorization is usually adopted across length and breadth of Indian schools. This paper sketches the need to redefine education to include more critical thinking by adopting constructivist pedagogy. The paper also proposes the important aspects such as integration of social and emotional learning in learning process for adoption of constructivism in classrooms, besides this it also outlines the learning strategies and learning design required for successful implementation of constructivism in teaching learning process.

Uso Ético del Poder Gerencial: Propuesta de un Programa para la Formación de Estudiantes de Ingeniería

This paper proposes a training program for the ethical use of managerial power for engineering students. The methodology used is of qualitative-type and included five stages: conceptual, relational, analytical, creative and empirical. In the two first stages the theoretical framework was build, in the third the pedagogical approach was selected, in the fourth the program was designed and in the fifth the program was tested. The program follows a social constructivist pedagogy approach and mixes theoretical sessions and readings with experiential and ludic activities. It is concluded that the proposed pedagogical approach is the most suitable for the training needs, because it allows the introjection of theoretical foundations through activities related with case studies, tragic issues, literature analysis, and personal experiences. Furthermore, the program contributes to develop competencies for the ethical use of power associated to engineering practice, and can be transferred to other engineering schools.

Experiential and Project-based Learning in BIM for Sustainable Living with Tiny Solar Houses

The tiny house movement represents a unique building initiative that aims to reduce the environmental and financial impacts of modern living. This paper introduces the integration of a tiny house competition project into an undergraduate construction management curriculum, and investigates the role of building information modeling (BIM) in facilitating sustainable living design and construction as well as student learning using an experiential and project-based pedagogy. As BIM is prevailing across the global design and construction industry, higher education has been striving on developing effective pedagogy to cultivate students’ competency in BIM. Most recently, the emphasis of BIM education has been transforming from software training to problem-solving in the context of project execution and management. Therefore, experiential and project-based learning seems to be a promising option for BIM education. This paper highlights the synergistic BIM usage in the tiny solar house project with broad student participation and comprehensive inclusion of both lower and upper division undergraduate construction management courses. The tiny solar house project provides the desired pedagogical construct that fosters active student learning engagement in attaining BIM knowledge and developing problem-solving skills with BIM at multiple phases that span from the inception of design, to construction and eventually the occupancy and operation.

Re-appropriating a question/answer system to support dialectical constructivist learning activity

Learning can be engaged by dialectic, that is, by identifying pros and cons that inhere in propositions, and more generally, by raising questions about the validity of claims. We report here on a classroom case study of dialectical constructivist pedagogy: Students created dialectical analyses of two lectures and four books as core activities in a freshman seminar “Information, People and Technology”. We adapted the functionality of Piazza, a free wiki-style question–answer course management infrastructure, and Toulmin argumentation structures to organize and facilitate these dialectical learning activities. In this paper, we motivate this approach, describe our implementation of it, and present interaction log data and content analysis of Piazza debates, and analysis of student self-reflections on learning activity and consequences, to assess issues in this approach, and directions for further instructional design and research.

Reclaiming Constructivist Pedagogy from Neoliberal IdeologyTeaching and Learning in Context: Why Pedagogical Reforms Fail in Sub-Saharan Africaby Richard Tabulawa. Dakar, Senegal: CODESRIA, 2013.

Any book whose author begins with a caveat about making the reader’s “comfort zone less comfortable” (xviii) may set itself up for sharp critical judgment from its reader. And when a book’s foreword (by Jonathan Jansen) warns about “opening a can of worms” (xiii) in international capitals of global aid, the stakes go higher yet. Richard Tabulawa’s Teaching and Learning in Context: Why Pedagogical Reforms Fail in Sub-Saharan Africa does indeed advance an argument that has the potential to make educationists and policy makers in Africa, and development partners in the global North, very uncomfortable. As is clear from the subtitle of his volume, Tabulawa argues that most pedagogical reforms in sub-Saharan Africa fail, and his book is an attempt to explain why. The argument that reforms fail when transplanted from one setting into another is not a new or strange critique. The particular reforms Tabulawa describes in his book, however, are those that have come to be accepted as current, innovative, and hence most helpful for learners in much of Africa. Tabulawa’s book argues that constructivist learner-centered pedagogies, which have become ubiquitous in classrooms across sub-Saharan Africa (and around the world for that matter), are pushed by international aid agencies as part of a neoliberal economic agenda to produce capitalist consumers in the region and globally. These reforms fail, he argues, because of two related reasons: (a) they are incompatible with the prevailing sociocultural conditions in sub-Saharan African countries and (b) in this case, both teachers and students in schools resist these pedagogical approaches. With such a startling premise, Tabulawa is burdened with the responsibility of marshaling evidence to back his assertion that progressive education is, in fact, a Trojan horse aimed at subjugating sub-Saharan Africa through “colonising and hegemonic tendencies” of neoliberal ideology (xxii). The book’s nine chapters disrupt claims about the efficacy of constructivist and learner-centered approaches to both teaching and learning. Tabulawa postulates that they are, instead, active drivers for promoting neoliberalism.

Students Taking Numerous Honours Courses in High School Have Higher Information Literacy Levels

A Review of:&#x0D; Fabbi, J. L. (2015). Fortifying the pipeline: A quantitative exploration of high school factors impacting the information literacy of first-year college students. College &amp; Research Libraries, 76(1), 31-42. http://dx.doi.org/10.5860/crl.76.1.31 &#x0D; &#x0D; Abstract&#x0D; &#x0D; Objective – To assess the impact of students’ high school performances on the development of their information literacy (IL) competency.&#x0D; &#x0D; Design – Statistical analysis of test performance.&#x0D; &#x0D; Setting – A large public university in the United States of America.&#x0D; &#x0D; Subjects – 93 first-time college freshmen. Of these, 46% had been admitted on a probationary status due to GPA under the required 3.0 (“alternate admits”), and 61% had not declared a major (“exploring majors”). 39% identified as Caucasian, 25% as Hispanic, 22% as African American, and 15% as Asian. 84% declared that their best language was English only.&#x0D; &#x0D; Methods – Participants were self-selected freshmen who enrolled into programs offered by the university’s Academic Success Center. They took the iSkills test, an online evaluation of information literacy competencies developed by the Educational Testing Service, and provided background data on their high school experience. Using hierarchical multiple regression analysis, the researcher evaluated predictors of iSkills score variance among a range of high school experiences: core high school GPA, number of honours classes taken in high school, and number of research projects or assignments in high school. The analysis controlled for gender, best language, race, and admission status as either alternate admit or exploring major.&#x0D; &#x0D; Main Results – Participants’ mean iSkills scores was below the minimum passing score for the test. There was a significant positive correlation between iSkills scores and exploring major status, core high school GPA, and having taken 5 to 12 honours courses. There was a negative correlation between iSkills scores and language other than English, Asian race, alternate admission status, and having had 1 to 4 honours courses. Among the background variables, the most significant predictor of a student’s iSkills score was his or her best language, followed by race. After controlling for these variables, the most important factors were students’ high school GPAs and the number of honors courses taken.&#x0D; &#x0D; Conclusion – The researcher discovered that the number of honours courses taken in high school is a strong predictor of information literacy competency as measured by the iSkills test. This remains true when controlling for race and other background factors. This finding is consistent with the assumption that high school teachers of honours courses believe their students to be capable of learning higher-order skills and therefore adopt a constructivist pedagogy, and that such pedagogy promotes the development of information literacy skills. Yet the number of high school research projects or assignments could not be statistically correlated to information literacy competency. In subsequent focus groups, students who had taken fewer honours courses expressed test anxiety, while students who had taken numerous honours courses expressed their determination to get the correct answer. This may inform one surprising result of the study: that students who took 13 or more honours courses in high school did not score significantly better on the iSkills test than those who took 5 to 12 courses.

Service-Learning and Emergent Communities of Practice: A Teacher Education Case Study

This study investigates the unexpected emergence of a community of practice in a middle level mathematics and science methods course. The authors describe how preservice teacher participation in a collaborative, project-based service-learning experience resulted in the formation of a community of practice characterized by teamwork, meaningful practice, and shared resources. The article concludes with a twofold argument demonstrating how collaborative, project-based service-learning experiences potentially contribute to preservice teacher learning via the positive outcomes that emerge from participation in a community of practice, while also reinforcing preservice teacher commitment to the constructive pedagogy of service-learning.

Teaching social research methods after the critical turn: challenges and benefits of a constructivist pedagogy

An increasing challenge for teaching methods courses in the social sciences is the ‘critical turn’, which has encouraged some students to adopt an anti-empirical orientation. We present a case study of a compulsory undergraduate methods course in a political science department strongly influenced by post-structuralist philosophies. The first author redesigned the course to implement four constructivist pedagogical principles: (1) develop a full understanding of students’ pre-existing perceptions of political science research methods; (2) encourage students to see methodology as an inevitably contested field; (3) provide space for students to choose a methodological approach that best aligns with their personal stance on knowledge; and (4) encourage students to view research as an ongoing ‘conversation’. We critically reflect on the implementation of these constructivist pedagogical strategies and argue they improve students’ critical engagement with course material, increase linkages between methods teaching and other disciplinary subject matter, and accommodate diverse student perspectives and needs.

ENGINEERS AS LIFE-LONG LEARNERS: PEDAGOGICAL TOOLS FOR ENGINEERING GRADUATE ATTRIBUTE DEVELOPMENT

We integrate three pedagogical constructs to design a novel toolbox to support engineering graduate attribute development and measurement of life-long learning. These constructs are (i) Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives in the Cognitive Domain, (ii) Curriculum mapping to skill levels of Introduction, Reinforcement, Mastery and Assessment (IRMA), and (iii) High Impact Practices (HIPs). We use the toolbox in a single, but in-depth, experiential education research study in our department’s Biomedical and Electrical Engineering program. We formally introduce these pedagogies to a cohort of eighteen final year students. The students then use the toolbox throughout the term to identify and address their own educational needs such that they develop into independent, competent life-long learners. We test the effectiveness of the toolbox using mixed methods research. Bloom’s Taxonomy levels scored by the instructor and the students had a correlation coefficient of 0.36. IRMA mapping was tested using binomial hypothesis testing. The test accepted the alternative hypothesis H1: Student mapping of course learning outcomes to a skill level was informed by the instructor’s pedagogy and followed the same distribution as the instructor's mapping, i.e., the mapping was not random and p≠0.5. Results showed H1: {I (47%), R (84%), M (63%)}. In addition, experiential impressions of life-long learning on the students were gathered through qualitatively written feedback.

Teacher change in implementing a research-developed representation construction pedagogy

The Representations in Learning Science (RiLS) project developed a representation construction approach to teaching and learning in science, which has successfully demonstrated enhanced student learning through sustained engagement with ideas, and enhancement of teachers’ pedagogical knowledge and understandings of how knowledge in science is developed and communicated. The current Constructing Representations in Science Pedagogy (CRISP) project aims at wider scale implementation of the representation construction approach. This paper explores a range of issues that confronted four Year 8 teachers in implementing this research-developed approach, such as: preparedness of the teacher in terms of epistemological positioning and positioning as a learner, significant support for planning and modelling by the university expert, and a team ethos where teachers share ideas and plan jointly. The Year 8 teachers implemented a representation construction approach to the teaching of the topic of astronomy. The Interconnected Model of Teacher Growth (IMTG) (Clarke & Hollingsworth, 2002) was used to analyse the teachers’ experience in planning and delivering the teaching sequence. This model was found to be flexible in identifying the experiences of teachers in different situations and useful in identifying issues for implementation of a research developed pedagogy.

Using Social Constructivist Pedagogy to Implement Liberal Learning in Business Education

ABSTRACTThis article outlines how decision sciences instructors, by pairing Liberal Learning (LL) philosophy with Social Constructivist Pedagogy (SCP), can lead the way in transforming business education. It outlines how these educators can cultivate more critical thinking and creativity in their classrooms in order to prepare students for the ‘real problems’ they will face in today's complex and global world. Instructors can accomplish this when they adjust ‘how’ they teach (rather than ‘what’ they teach) so that students become active learners rather than passive listeners. The purpose of the article is to outline the outcomes advocated by the LL philosophy (Colby, Ehrlich, Sullivan, &amp; Dolle, 2011), and describe how SCP, a pedagogical process, can help decision sciences instructors achieve these outcomes (Vygotsky, 1978). Instructors essentially become facilitators of discussion and dialogue rather than the sole distributor of knowledge in the classroom. Two sample implementations of SCP and LL are also discussed.

A Meta-analysis into the Effectiveness of Doctoral Dissertations on Constructivist Learning

This paper aims to combine the results obtained by studies conducted independently of each other on constructivist learning in Turkey. The question the study seeks to answer is expressed as: Does constructivist learning approach affect students' academic achievement?. In this context, the literature research was made between 2001 and 2013, and 27 doctoral dissertations written in Turkish about the effect of constructivist learning on students' academic achievement were included in the meta-analysis. In line with the determined criteria, the 27 doctoral dissertations conducted on the effect of constructivist learning in Turkey, it can be said that the applied constructivist education has an effect on academic achievement in the classification framework of Cohen and it is located in the wide interval which is the highest level. Following meta-analysis, it was concluded that constructivist learning approach was effective in terms of academic achievement in the positive direction.

Learner-Centered Pedagogy: Considerations for Application in a Didactic Course

A learner-centered teaching approach is well known in higher education but has not been fully addressed within counselor education. Instructors who adopt this approach value a collaborative approach to teaching and learning, one that honors students' wisdom and contributions. Teachers create a learning environment encouraging students to actively engage in and take ownership of their learning experiences, an environment inspiring students to think deeply about how they might apply what they are learning to their future practice. It may be particularly challenging for counselor educators to incorporate learner-centered teaching strategies into didactic courses that are traditionally heavy in content versus smaller experiential courses such as practica and internships. In this article, learner-centered teaching is described, and a case study demonstrates how a learner-centered approach may be applied to a traditionally didactic counseling course.Keywords: pedagogy, teaching, learner-centered, counselor education, didacticFor the past decade, there has been a call in higher education for a shift from teacher-centered methods of instruction to learner-centered pedagogy (Brown, 2003; Crick & McCombs, 2006; Harris & Cullen, 2008). Educators who use a learner-centered model view learning as nonlinear, multidimensional and a phenomenon that occurs relationally within a social context (Cornelius-White, 2007). Their use of learner-centered pedagogy favors a democratic approach to teaching that shifts the instructor from the center of the learning environment to a more peripheral position. This shift is achieved by increasing students' opportunities to actively participate in the classroom and engage in self-directed learning outside the classroom, as well as providing forums through which they can share learned information with peers (Wright, 2011). Educators who use learner-centered pedagogy favor differentiated modalities to facilitate learning, in contrast to instructors who use teacher-centered models of teaching that rely on lecture as the primary means of instruction.While learner-centered literature is well known within the domain of higher education, as of yet it has not been thoroughly addressed within the scope of counselor education. Scholars and researchers in counselor education have focused on what content should be included in curricula (Granello, 2000) or specific teaching techniques used in class (May, 2004; Shepard & Brew, 2005; Stinchfield, 2006), rather than comprehensive approaches toward teaching that are helpful for engaging student learning. Yet several pedagogies are present in the counselor education literature such as contextual teaching (Granello, 2000), constructivist pedagogy (Nelson & Neufeldt, 1998), experiential teaching approaches (Grant, 2006), and transparent counseling pedagogy (Dollarhide, Smith, & Lemberger, 2007). These authors have described alternative and innovative methods for engaging student learners.Teaching practices such as contextual teaching, constructivist pedagogy, experiential teaching approaches and transparent counseling pedagogy share commonalities with, and reflect certain ideals of, learner-centered pedagogy. We believe that learner-centered pedagogy could represent an overarching theoretical umbrella, under which previous teaching practices presented in the counseling literature could represent different forms of learner-centered instruction. In this way, learner-centered pedagogy may serve as a conceptual framework that educators can use to provide an impactful learning experience for counseling students.We provide a brief description of the learning needs of counselor education students based on the demands they will face working as professional counselors, followed by an explanation of how learner-centered pedagogy may ultimately help professional counselors meet these demands. A case study is then presented to demonstrate how learner-centered pedagogy was applied in a couples counseling class. …

The Effects of Teaching Geometry on the Academic Achievement by Using Puppet Method

The alternating education system are effective on many departments and so on mathematic. First step is that the courses are not teacher centered but learner centered. The system are changed by passing from the behaviourist education system to the constructivist education which focus on the learner and learning with real life. So, a new material about geometrical objects is developed for 8th grade students at primary school. The material is a puppet every part of body made from a geometrical object. The purpose of this research is to observe the effects of the geometry teaching by using this puppet. In our research, the method is applied on the 8th grade students. The sample of research included 50 student from 8th grade of a primary school of Sivas Ministry of Education in 2013-2014 education year. The Controlled Group Pre-test and Final-Test model is used in research. This model includes two groups developed by neutral posting. One of these groups is called test group and the other is control group. The pre-test and after test measurements are applied on the groups. The Achievement Test of geometrical objects is used to collect data. At the end of the research it is observed that the test group that the puppet model is used, is more successful than the group that traditional education model is used. Report shows that the learner-centered model rises the academic achievement in schools.

The Fundaments of Constructivist Pedagogy

Our study underlines the specific study object, the specific normativity and the specific research methodology for constructivist pedagogy. he specific study object of constructivist pedagogy constitutes the difference between the inner system of the one who learns and the external environment objective, natural, community, cultural, civic, political, religious etc., at which the pupil refers to subjectively. The specific normativity of constructivist pedagogy engages four central principles: a) the principle of self-preserving the trainee's resources; b) the principle of the subjective reporting of the educated to the objective reality; c) the principle of the viable, efficient pedagogic activity / action; d) the principle of subjective valorizing of the objective reality.