Reading 10 (Theme 4)

Reading 10
third reading on Theme 4 : Development and design of courses

Karagiorgi, Y. & Symeou, L. (2005). Translating Constructivism into Instructional Design: Potential and Limitations. Educational Technology & Society, 8 (1), 17-27

Accessed via Massey Library


Browsing the journals, this article caught my eye as there has been some renewed discussion on the constuctivist issues in our online discussions. Published three years ago, this is no revolutionary article, but it does offer an organised response to radical constructivists.This paper offers an overview of constructivist theory, discusses its underlying principles (active, collaborative and authentic learning) and distinguishes between radical and non-radical constructivism. It advocates the latter within a pragmatic approach to design.

The challenges for instructional design:
• If each learner is responsible for knowledge construction, then designers cannot determine and ensure a common set of outcomes for learning; the learners’ autonomy makes it hard to predict how learners will learn or how to plan instructional activities.
• Evaluation – when learning outcomes are individually constructed, it is difficult to set standards to assess the meaningfulness of the learning.
• Learner control – possible construction of “wrong” knowledge; not all learners benefit from control over their own learning

Reasons for these problems stem from the fact that constructivism is a learning theory and not a learning strategy nor a theory of teaching. Thus a dialogue between learning theorists and instructional developers is required.

The authors give the example of Merill’s second generation instructional design theory as an example of application of moderate constructivism. This assumes that
• mental models are constructed by the learner as a result of experience,
• content of each individual’s mental model may be different, but the structure is the same,
• knowledge can be pre-specified and represented in a knowledge base that applies to different domains;
• teaching authentic tasks in context is desirable, but teaching decontextualised abstractions is also necessary
• instructional strategy and subject matter are somewhat independent
• there are fundamental instructional transactions that can be adapted to a wide variety of situations and used with different subject matter contents
• there are classes of strategies appropriate for all learners
• learning should be active but not always collaborative
• testing could be integrated and consistent with learning objectives, but separate assessment of achievement is also possible

Technology tools supporting moderate constructivism include hypermedia environments that offer non-linear learning and increased learner control;virtual realities offer experiential learning and phenomenaria (artificially limited arenas where phenomena to investigate occur), webQuests and other WorldWideWeb offerings.

DISCUSSION
The article endorses my personal view that design needs to be eclectic. Having come across Merill's more recent work in course readings, I found references to him in this article more significant.

The authors note that within constructivism, the design task is one of providing rich context within which meaning can be negotiated, and ways of understanding emerge. If each leaner has a unique perspective, the concept of “average” learner is rejected. This becomes a problem for design when, as in an earlier reading (8 by Barbour) the practice at secondary school level aims at the average and below average student.
I’m also reminded of problems I posed at the end of reading 5. If learners arrive with different levels of prior knowledge, how does the designer know where to begin?