Constructivism Theorists
Jean Piaget is a Swiss psychologist who began to study human development in the 1920s. His proposed a development theory has been widely discussed in both psychology and education fields. To learn, Piajet stressed the holistic approach. A child contructs understanding through many channels: reading, listening, exploring and experiencing his or her environment
Piaget work has identified four major stages of cognitive growth that emerge from birth to about the age of 14-16.
A child will develop through each of these stages until he or she can reason logically.
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Approximate Age
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stage
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Major Development
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Birth to 2 years
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Sensorimotor
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Infants use sensory and motor capabilities to explore and gain understanding of their environments. | ||
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2 to 7 years
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Preoperational
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Children begin to use symbols. They respond to objects and events according to how they appear to be. | ||
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7 to 11 years
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Concrete operational
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Children begin to think logically. | ||
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11 years and beyond
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Formal operational
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Children begin to think about thinking. Thoughts is systematic and abstract. |
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The learner is advanced through three mechanisms.
1. Assimilation - fitting a new experience into an exisiting mental structure(schema).
2. Accomodation - revising an exisiting schema because of new experience.
3. Equilibrium - seeking cognitive stability through assimilation and accomodation.
Lev Vygotsky, a Russian psychologist and philosopher in the 1930s, is most often associated with the social constructivist theory. He emphasizes the influences of cultural and social contexts in learning and supports a discovery model of learning. this type of model places the teacher in an active role while the students' mental abilities develop naturally through various paths od discovery.
Vygotsky's theory presents three principles:
1. Making meaning - the community places a central role, and the people around the student greatly affect the way he or she sees the world.
2. Tools for cognitive development - the type and quality of these tools (culture, language, important adults to the student) determine the pattern and rate of development.
3. The Zone of Proximal Development - problem solving skills of tasks can be placed into three categories: Those performed independetly by the learner. Those that cannot be performed even with help. Those that faal between the two extremes, the tasks that can be performed with help from others.
Jerome Bruner (1915 -) is an American psychologist and culture-interested educator. His work on perception, learning, memory and other aspects of cognition in young ones has influenced the American educational system, he has been at the forefront of what is often called the Cognitive Revolution.
Bruner who developed the discovery learning theory, states some major ideas about learning: Learning is an active, social process in which students construct new ideas or concepts based on current knowledge. The student selects information, originates hypotheses, and makes decisions in the process of integrating experiences into their existing mental constructs. As far as instruction is concerned, the instructor should try and encourage students to discover principles by themselves. The instructor and student should engage in an active dialogue. Bruner holds that a theory of instruction should address four major aspects:
1. Predisposition towards learning.
2. The ways in which a body of knowledge can be structured so that it can be most readily grasped by the learner.
3. The most effective sequences in which to present material.
4. The nature and pacing of rewards and punishments.His view is: Good methods for structuring knowledge should result in simplifying, generating new propositions, and increasing the manipulation of information. He believes that instruction must be concerned with the experiences and contexts that make the student willing and able to learn (readiness), instruction must be structured so that it can be easily grasped by the student (spiral organization), and instruction should be designed to facilitate extrapolation and or fill in the gaps (going beyond the information given).