Constructivism

Cody Smith
EPSY 302-D01
10/28/16

Constructivism is one of the many theories about how people learn. The theory states that

people grow in knowledge based on their own personal understanding and previous knowledge base. It

equates learning with creative meaning from experience, meaning that [it] can help engage and

motivate your students by making them take a more active role in the learning process (Learning for

the 21st Century!, 2012). In ice skating, you cant just hop onto the ice and skate around like a gazelle

without first knowing how to stand up on skates and push off the ice to move around. Before we take a

deeper look at constructivism, we will look at three major constructivists: Burner, Piaget, and Vygotsky.

Without these three individuals, constructivism would not exist for starters, but also not be as widely

known or even at the same level where it is today at its complexity.

Born in the US on October 20th, 1859, John Dewey was a major voice of progressive education

and liberalism, as well as for his publications about education. He also wrote about metaphysics,

aesthetics, epistemology, art, logic, social theory, and ethics. Dewey is often cited as the founder of

constructivism. His educational theories were presented throughout several of his books.

Jean Piaget was clinical psychologist who was best known for his work in childhood

development. Trained as a biologist, he worked part-time with kids at Binet Institute (He came up with

Piagets theory of cognitive development, which is a theory about the nature about the nature and

development of human intelligence. Piaget said that people grow into stages: Sensorimotor Stage,

Preoperational Stage, Concrete Operations Stage, and finally Formal Operation Stage. Each stage goes

through a different period of ones own life, and any stage could last longer or shorter from person to

person, as everyone grows and learns at a difference pace or in a different way. We will take a deeper

look at each of the stages to better grasp what Piagets stages are.
 The sensorimotor stage goes from birth until around two years old, when infants start scheme

development (a plan, design, or program of action to be followed (Dictionary.com)). Preoperational

stage lasts from two to six or seven years of age, where children learn mostly language, and are very

egocentric, having a hard time seeing from anothers point of view. From preoperational, children move

to concrete operations, years six or seven to eleven or twelve. Children learn multiple necessary skills

that will stay with them for the rest of their lives, such as deductive reasoning, and the ability to reason

through the transformation of an object. The final stage from eleven or twelve for the rest of their lives,

people will be in the formal operation stage. Here, people will have the ability to deal with hypothetical

and abstract ideas, manipulate variables, and set up and test hypotheses.

The Theory of Cognitive Development can be a great help for teachers if they want to create a

task for students, but ensure that that task is within the parameters of the students competency. You

could not use a parenthetical question with kindergarteners, as they would not understand it. At the

same time, you would not build a puzzle with juniors in high-school to get them to understand

something. This theory works perfectly with when most people learn their alphabet and how to read

and write, as young children in the preoperational stage. Likewise, you learn the scientific method in

high-school when you can make hypothesis. The theory of cognitive development does not force a

person to be in the stage when they are at that age, meaning a five-year-old could be developing faster

than some six or even seven-year-olds. The five-year-old could be moving into the concrete operations

while the six or seven-year-old are still in preoperational.

If you were to look up anything over cognitive development from the past several decades, odds

are that you have found a theory known as Social Development Theory and have heard of the name

Vygotsky. Born (Lev Simkhovich Vygodskiy), Lev was a soviet psychologist

who proposed a theory of development of higher cognitive functions in children. He proposed the zone

of proximal development (ZPD), which was the range of tasks that a child is in the process of learning to
complete. In more simple words, the ZPD is what learners can do with guidance, as opposed to what

they can do by themselves, or what they cannot do. According to Vygotsky, Social interaction plays a

fundamental role in the process of cognitive development (Social Development Theory, 2014) and that

social learning must precede development, which was opposite of Piaget who said development

necessarily precedes learning.

Lev Vygotsky also used a learning method known as scaffolding. Scaffolding allows the learners

to accomplish tasks that they would not normally be able to accomplish on their own. It allows learners

to transition between what they already know and what they can accomplish by letting them build off of

what they already know. It does not necessarily have to be what the learner him/herself know either, it

could be a peer, or even simply a more experienced individual such as an upperclassman or a teacher.

By having students take an active role in their own education, they will desire to learn more

than if they were taking a passive role. The traditional teaching method has teachers talking and

students listening, which does not do a good job at engaging the students. A constructivist teacher

would instead have the students build off of what they already know and understand to help them to

learn, either by telling students the steps (that they already know) up to the new information, or have

them collaborate with other students to try and understand a particular topic.

Lets take percentages as an example. How would you teach percentages if you were to use the

traditional teaching method? I am unsure of how that would be possible to explain the concept of

percentages without first having some sort of prerequisite knowledge of division. In order to teach it,

first you would have to know about fractions, and before that division, and even before that addition

and subtraction (to go to the extreme). You cant learn multiplication without first understanding

addition, and how multiplication is adding x amount of times. Division would be a very difficult thing to

understand if you do not first understand multiplication. Fractions would come naturally from learning
division, just in a different point of view from division. Once you know about fractions, then you can use

that knowledge to understand percentages.

As students are challenged with more complex problems with several different paths that they

can take, the constructivist approach becomes more viable than a simple problem. Instead of a problem

having a simple solution: 2+2=4, a question could have various ways to come up with the same answer:

finding the 3rd derivative of some function x. Using constructivism in this situation could have students

get into groups of three or four students and, as a group, come up with some way to find the answer.

Since the question is very complex; every group will come up with a different method for finding the

solution as the students pool their own individual knowledge.

Citations:

the definition of scheme. (2016).Dictionary.com. Retrieved 11 November 2016, from

http://www.dictionary.com/browse/scheme

John Dewey. (2016). En.wikipedia.org. Retrieved 10 November 2016, from

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dewey

Learning for the 21st Century!, Use a Learning Theory: Constructivism. (2012). YouTube. Retrieved 6

November 2016, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xa59prZC5gA

Social Development Theory. (2014). Learning Theories. Retrieved 11 November 2016, from

https://www.learning-theories.com/vygotskys-social-learning-theory.html