Constructivism: When it's the wrong idea and when it's the only idea.

Constructivist approaches to learning and instruction have been roundly criticized in several prominently placed articles in recent years (e.g., Mayer, 2004; Kirschner, Sweller, & Clark, 2006). A key to the power of the critiques has been the predominance of empirical findings indicating the greater effectiveness of highly guided instruction when compared to constructivist approaches that have a relative lack of direct instructional guidance. It is not a coincidence that these empirical findings have come almost exclusively from well-structured domains within mathematics and science and a few outside those areas (e.g., more orderly aspects of reading development related to the graphophonemic code). We have no objection to the argument that highly guided learning and direct instruction can be maximally effective in such domains, where by their very nature it is possible to determine what information “fully explains the concepts and procedures that students are required to learn” (Kirschner et al., 2006, p. 75). The argument of this chapter is a simple one: the success of direct instructional guidance approaches in well-structured domains (WSDs) cannot extend to ill-structured domains (ISDs), in principle, because of the very nature of those domains. That which would be directly instructed and explicitly guided does not exist in ill-structured domains-hence the claim that it is not a coincidence that direct instructional guidance approaches lack a corpus of supporting data in ISDs like they have in WSDs. Given that the debate between these approaches is unsettled on empirical grounds for ISDs, this chapter aims to provide some conceptual clarification of key issues of learning and instruction in such domains. The hope is that such clarification would contribute toward forming a basis for empirical work that would directly address the debated issues of this volume. The argument will be developed by first discussing the nature of ISDs and the kinds of learning and instruction that that nature would seem to exclude bydefinition. Then we will present quotes from papers by direct instructional guidance advocates in order to make their goals and recommendations explicit. It will be shown that those explicitly stated goals could not be achieved given the very nature of learning in ISDs. That is, what makes a domain ill structured is the absence of the very features that are supposed to be directly instructed and supported. Further, empirical evidence will be cited for the hazards of treating ISDs as if they were WSDs in the kinds of guidance and support provided. The differing nature of guidance and support in a constructivist framework developed for learning and instruction in ISDs is briefly addressed. In the penultimate section, an argument is presented for the Web as an ideal environment for deep learning in ISDs, but one that requires relatively open exploration unfettered by direct instructional intervention for that potential to be achieved. In the final section, we make the claim that treating ISDs as if they were well-structured is no longer just an academic argument with implications for such things as test scores (as important as the latter may be), but rather has potentially significant societal consequences.