Applying Constructivism: A Test for the Learner-as-Scientist

Constructivist learning theory predicts that knowledge encoded from data by learners themselves will be more flexible, transferable, and useful than knowledge encoded for them by experts and transmitted to them by an instructor or other delivery agent. If this prediction is correct, then learners should be modeled as scientists and use the reasoning and technologies of scientists to construct their own knowledge. However, it cannot be taken for granted that the prediction is correct, or correct in every knowledge domain. The present study attempts to establish conditions in which the prediction can be operationalized and tested. It reports on the adaptation of constructivist principles to instructional design in a particular domain, second language vocabulary acquisition. Students learning English for academic purposes in the Sultanate of Oman followed one of two approaches to vocabulary expansion, learning pre-encoded dictionary definitions of words, or constructing definitions for themselves using an adapted version of the computational tools qfi lexicographers. After 12 weeks, both groups were equal in definitional knowledge of target words, but lexicography group students were more able to transfer their word knowledge to novel contexts. [] A constructivist model of learning has been proposed as an alternative to the transmission model implicit in most behaviorist and some cognitive approaches (Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989). There are a number of competing constructivisms (Phillips, 1995), but the underlying principle is that two kinds of knowledge are created by two kinds of learning. One kind is inert, easily forgotten, and untransferable beyond its initial situation of learning because it was "pre-emptively encoded" (Spiro, Coulson, Feltovich, & Anderson, 1988, p. 377) by an expert for transmission to a learner. The other kind is memorable and transferable to novel contexts because learners have encoded it for themselves from raw data, or at least raised it to a higher level of organization, by forming and testing hypotheses in some version of what professional scientists do (Resnick, 1987). Constructivism has recently become interesting to educational technologists, partly because of the ways information technology is impacting on life, learning, and work (Duffy & Jonassen, 1991), and partly because it offers a new approach to instructional design as interest wanes in the instructional systems technology model (Bednar, Cunningham, Duffy, & Perry, 1991). However, up to now a role for constructivism has been discussed more in principle than in practice, and claims about the kind of knowledge it produces remain largely untested.