tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11679714.post5363731815459168963..comments2024-03-28T03:32:41.433-04:00Comments on Half an Hour: Kirschner, Sweller, Clark (2006) - SummaryStephen Downeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06140591903467372209noreply@blogger.comBlogger7125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11679714.post-32849031446668944562008-03-04T08:07:00.000-05:002008-03-04T08:07:00.000-05:00Gary, good point that I sloppily described constru...Gary, good point that I sloppily described constructivism as 'students wandering freely around a museum and creating their own learning.' <BR/><BR/>But my point is that I do not think that a constructivist would be persuaded to drop constructivism and adopt instructivism if an experiment comparing the two approaches showed better test results for the instructivist approach. <BR/><BR/>That's because these are philosophies or world-views. <BR/><BR/>In practice a constructivist and an instructivist would design and test a visit to a museum differently because they fundamentally believe different things about learning.Unknownhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11305905421283499822noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11679714.post-28625713384060254982008-03-03T22:01:00.000-05:002008-03-03T22:01:00.000-05:00PBL is NOT an example of minimally guided instruct...PBL is NOT an example of minimally guided instruction. Be sure to read Schmidt, Loyens, van Gog and Paas (2007) and Hmelo-Silver, Duncan and Chinn (2007) for a deconstruction of Kirschner et al.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11679714.post-55163038175795086512007-11-13T13:19:00.000-05:002007-11-13T13:19:00.000-05:00Tom, you are still buying into a definition of con...Tom, you are still buying into a definition of constructivism that is not accurate. KS&C have conflated informal learning with constructivism. There is no reason that the theory of constructivism cannot be applied to formal learning in a very rigorously "guided" and "tested" environment--though I think you are correct that a deeper understanding of the theory would recognize and respond to the extreme limits of formal testing as a useful way to measure learning. But a constructivist is also likely to advocate very mindful ways to structure a learner's experience cognizant of those learners' background knowledge.Gary Brownhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03398121466746597051noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11679714.post-91696607827897741352007-11-13T09:34:00.000-05:002007-11-13T09:34:00.000-05:00Stephen, my thought is that constructivism and ins...Stephen, my thought is that constructivism and instructivism are different "world views" that will never be persuaded by each other's data. <BR/><BR/>Each side perceives the other side as dodging the question. <BR/><BR/>An example might be students exploring a museum freely and discovering their own learnings. <BR/><BR/>If an instructivist said, "On a test at the end, those students did worse than students who were given direct instruction," a constructivist would be unimpressed. <BR/><BR/>Conversely, if a constructivist said, "In a discussion at the end, those students' comments indicated appreciation, application, and synthesis," an instructivist would probably be skeptical that two independent observers would code the comments the same way. <BR/><BR/>Tom WernerUnknownhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11305905421283499822noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11679714.post-89829360716584470382007-11-13T01:06:00.000-05:002007-11-13T01:06:00.000-05:00Strawmen indeed! Perhaps the most contentious aspe...Strawmen indeed! Perhaps the most contentious aspect is on the first page, where discovery learning, PBL, inquiry learning, experiential learning and constructivist learning are lumped gaily together under the term "minimally guided". Leaving aside the fact that constructivist learning, as they call it, is of a different order than the others (and they seem to have left out a few -!!- of the seminal constructivist authors, whose work they could address), the arguments for the similarity between these approaches are highly selective, and differences between them are conveniently ignored. It is questionable to argue that any of these approaches involves "minimal" guidance. (The conflation of "instruction" and "guidance" in their terminology is itself "interesting") <BR/>Shulman is quoted, briefly, (elsewhere he emphasises the importance of avoiding an "overly technical image of teaching, a scientific exercise that has lost its soul" !!). The concept of pedagogic content knowledge is glossed over in order to allow it to support their thesis; more detailed discussion would reveal that it is arguably a concept that would support a diversity of pedagogical approaches. Such as for example the diversity these authors collapse into one in their second paragraph!!!.https://www.blogger.com/profile/14111737124452942255noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11679714.post-21938740586037367132007-11-12T20:52:00.000-05:002007-11-12T20:52:00.000-05:00Bruner says, "How one conceives of education, we h...Bruner says, "How one conceives of education, we have finally come to recognize, is a function of how one conceives of culture and its aims, professed and otherwise." <BR/><BR/>The conceptualization of education implicit in the KSC article appears to me to be very very narrow.<BR/><BR/>Bruner also says, "The teaching and learning of structure, rather than simply the mastery of facts and techniques, is at the center of the classic problem of transfer... If earlier learning is to render later learning easier, it must do so by providing a general picture in terms of which the relations between things encountered earlier and later are made as clear as possible." <BR/><BR/>The implications of this single sentence, most notably that there is a role for "teaching," appears to elude the summary if not the understanding presented by KSC.<BR/><BR/>These two quotes illustrate that K,S, & C have deeply misunderstood Bruner. Similarly, they also fail to adequately and fairly summarize the others they have conflated into a single category and then further reduced into their category of "minimal guidance." In simple terms, "strategic guidance" or "contextualized guidance" might have been more appropriate characterizations of some aspects of the theorists and researchers they have clumped into straw men. Their characterization of learning is similarly constrained. Their review of the information processing literature they rely on is also reductive. <BR/><BR/>I would venture to say that in their own learning, they have been , well, misguided. <BR/><BR/>There is no real debate here to sink one's teeth into.Gary Brownhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03398121466746597051noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11679714.post-50000959645195413352007-11-12T19:00:00.000-05:002007-11-12T19:00:00.000-05:00http://www.cogtech.usc.edu/publications/kirschner_...http://www.cogtech.usc.edu/publications/kirschner_Sweller_Clark.pdf<BR/><BR/>looks like working replacement for the dead link at the top of the post, Stephen.<BR/><BR/>SebAnonymousnoreply@blogger.com