Application of Constructivist Principles to the Practice of Instructional Technology By Bonnie Skaalid

I found this while procrastinating on finishing my masters paper.

Disgusted with how this has transformed from a labour of interest and love to one of ‘hoop jumping’ that is just what I Googled… along with ‘education’. This is just what I was looking for:

Instructional Strategy Development

• Distinguish between instructional goals and learners’ goals; support learners in pursuing their own goals. Ng and Bereiter (1991) distinguish between (1) task-completion goals or hoop jumping,” (2) instructional goals set by the system, and (3) personal knowledge-building goals set by the student. The three do not always converge. A student motivated by task-completion goals doesn’t even consider learning, yet many students’ behavior in schools is driven by performance requirements. Constructivist instruction would nourish and encourage pursuit of personal knowledge-building goals, while still supporting instructional goals. As Mark Twain put it: “I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.”

…no they do not converge and no I do not feel nourished… and I should really listen to Mr. Twain!

So can technology come to the rescue?

• Allow for multiple goals for different learners. ID often includes the implicit assumption that instructional goals will be identical for all learners. This is sometimes necessary, but not always. Hypermedia learning environments almost by definition are designed to accommodate multiple learning goals. Even within traditional classrooms, technologies exist today for managing multiple learning goals (Collins, 1991).

• Appreciate the interdependency of content and method. Traditional design theory treats content and the method for teaching that content as orthogonally independent factors. Postmodern ID says you can’t entirely separate the two. When you use a Socratic method, you are teaching something quite different than when you use worksheets and a posttest. Teaching concepts via a rule definition results in something different than teaching the concept via rich cases. Just as McLuhan discerned the confounding of “media” and “message,” so designers must see how learning goals are not uniformly met by interchangeable instructional strategies (see Wilson & Cole, in preparation).

So we should be spending our time ‘designing’ learning environments… I need to look up ‘hypermedia learning environments’.

I like the focus in this next section:

• Think in terms of designing learning environments rather than selecting instructional strategies. Metaphors are important. Does the designer “select” a strategy or “design” a learning experience? Grabinger, Dunlap, and Heath (1993) provide design guidelines for what they call realistic environments for active learning (REAL); these guidelines reflect a constructivist orientation:

  • Extend students’ responsibility for their own learning.
  • -Allow students to determine what they need to learn.
  • -Enable students to manage their own learning activities.
  • -Enable students to contribute to each other’s learning.
  • -Create a non-threatening setting for learning.
  • -Help students develop metacognitive awareness.
  • Make learning meaningful.
  • -Make maximum use of existing knowledge.
  • -Anchor instruction in realistic settings.
  • -Provide multiple ways to learn content.
  • Promote active knowledge construction.
  • -Use activities to promote higher level thinking.
  • -Encourage the review of multiple perspectives.
  • -Encourage creative and flexible problem solving.
  • -Provide a mechanism for students to present their learning.

• Think of instruction as providing tools that teachers and students can use for learning; make these tools user-friendly. This frame of mind is virtually the opposite of “teacher-proofing” instructional materials to assure uniform adherence to designers’ use expectations. Instead, teachers and students are encouraged to make creative and intelligent use of instructional tools and resources.

There is so much room for creativity, the use of metaphors, and problem solving… meeting multiple goals for individual learners… as long as we invest time in making the learning meaningfully relevant, and in designing flexible learning environments.

The hardest bone to swallow here, the one that sticks in my throat as I sit here gnawing on the sparse backbone of higher learning, is that this freedom is what I desire for my own learning, but how much of it do I offer to my own students in my classroom?

How many of them are jumping through my hoops?