Constructivism

Constructivism is a contemporary epistemology that holds that human beings construct knowledge by giving meaning to current experiences in light of prior knowledge, mental structures, experiences, and beliefs. It is based on the assumption that the source of a person's understanding of external phenomena is in the person's mind. The grid of the mind shapes the individual's responses. Some constructivists believe that there is no objective world independent of human mental activity. They claim that each individual creates his or her personal world, and any one world is no more real than the other. Other constructivists believe the mind is instrumental in interpreting events, objects, and perspectives in the real world and those interpretations produce a knowledge base that is idiosyncratic.

Applied to education, constructivist theory acknowledges the impact of unobservable events on human behavior. The mind is viewed as an active [Page 196]participant in helping people make sense of reality. Using the scientific metaphor of the “black box,” a constructivist orientation attempts to make sense of what comes between instruction (input) and achievement (output), connecting students' achievements to the knowledge, skills, and strategies they bring to a learning situation.

The behaviorist tradition has dominated formal schooling for the past 100 years and is still a major determinant in how schools are managed and how students are taught. To a behaviorist, all events are clearly observable, and since the activities of the mind are not observable, mind as a concept, is not useful. The behaviorists reason that while the mind may exist, it is an unnecessary construct in understanding the learning process.

For the behaviorist, learning results when students are taught to respond uniformly to an objective interpretation of reality. While reality may change in light of new discoveries, learning about reality is a matter of reinforcing correct responses and extinguishing incorrect ones. This orientation has led to a legion of school practices, such as textbook teaching, onesize-fits-all instructional methodology, ability grouping, norm-referenced testing, normal distribution curves, and rewards-and-punishment discipline programs.

The constructivist views learning as an individual matter. No two learners are identical even though they may have similar needs and share common experiences. Learners construct reality in terms of their prior experiences, their conceptual knowledge, their procedural schemas, their values, their attitudes, and their preferred ways of knowing. Mind serves as the mediator between the learner and external reality.

In a school setting, information presented to students in lecture or text may not be the information that is ultimately received. No matter how clearly a teacher or a text presents information, no two learners receive it in exactly the same way. The fidelity of the reception depends on several preexisting variables within each learner. No matter how logically the curriculum is presented, the individual learner determines the outcome.