Learning and constructivism.

In this chapter, I try to make explicit some issues that have been somewhat overlooked in the debate over the “Failure of constructivist, discovery, problembased, experiential, and inquiry-based teaching” (Kirschner, Sweller, & Clark, 2006). The tendency has been to lump all these methods under the term “constructivist” and hence to identify constructivism with minimal guidance in instruction. This practice is quite general, but it obscures another meaning of the term constructivism: that learning is an active process, that knowledge is constructed. This is a very important point, about which there is considerable agreement in the research literature. In rejecting “constructivism” we do not want to revert to a view of learning as passive knowledge acquisition. The active role that the learner plays in acquiring knowledge must be clearly understood. Learners are not simply receiving information or acquiring knowledge by osmosis, but must be actively engaged in knowledge building. The role of instruction is to constrain and guide their activities. The question of how much guidance is optimal for learning is a separate issue. This is not to say that Kirschner et al. (2006) advocate a view of learning as passive information reception. They are quite clear and explicit about this: the goal of instruction is to alter long-term memory, and long-term memory is not a passive repository of information; knowledge in long-term memory must be constructed. Thus, what I am discussing here is nothing new. Nevertheless, it is an issue that could use further clarification. Although the terminological confusion in the term constructivism is clearly recognized by Kirschner et al. (2006) as well as the authors who replied to their article, it may easily be misunderstood by some readers. Therefore, I would like to elaborate on how knowledge is constructed, on the differences between novices and experts, and on the role of guidance in instruction. I shall do this from a viewpoint that is a little different. The discussion so far has focused on problem solving, whereas I propose to view the issue of constructivism from the viewpoint of comprehension, specifically text comprehension. There is a rich literature in this area that, as I shall show, complements the literature on problem solving in sometimes illuminating ways. Furthermore, text comprehension is not a well-structured domain such as problem solving in mathematics or physics, and extending the discussion beyond suchdomains would be useful, as Schmidt, Loyens, van Gog, and Paas (2007) have suggested. My goal here is to distinguish clearly the constructive aspects of learning, the process of knowledge construction, from the question of how much guidance is optimal for learning. Although minimal guidance and discovery learning have frequently been advocated by constructivists, minimal guidance does not necessarily follow from a constructivist view of learning. Instructional methods are most effective when they respect the view of learning as an active (and, indeed, often effortful) process, with the right amount of guidance determined by the characteristics of the learner and the to-be-learned material-which is not necessarily minimal guidance. Again, there is nothing new about this claim: Kirschner et al. (2006), as well as Hmelo-Silver, Duncan, and Chinn (2007) and Schmidt et al. (2007) explicitly agree that the level of guidance for optimal learning must be adapted to the learner and the material they are supposed to master (although they might disagree on what constitutes a minimal and optimal level of guidance). However, considering how this issue plays out in the domain of text comprehension might help us to obtain a better grasp of it.