Pre-reading activity

The constructivist perspective on learning

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What is constructed in constructivism?

Constructivism in education refers (by analogy with the construction of a building) to the construction of a learner's knowledge. There is an internal process that allows a person to use experiences in the world (including reading texts, listening to teachers, etc.) to 'build up' complex knowledge structures.

This is clearly not simply a matter of teachers explaining ideas specified in the curriculum, that then somehow transfers these ideas from the teacher's mind to the learners' minds so that they understand them the way the teacher does (as we know by how often learners fail to understand, or misunderstand, or fail to later remember or be able to apply what they are taught…)

Constructivist ideas are relevant to:

• how human learning occurs (and therefore to)
• why teaching-learning sometimes goes wrong (and therefore to)
• how teachers can teach in ways that best match the way human beings learn

Download an 'Encyclopedia' article on Educational Constructivism

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Memory

A key faculty in learning is memory.

We use the word memory to refer to several somewhat different features of cognition:

• the facility to later recall to consciousness material represented in long-term memory (such as remembering a fact, remembering an experience, etc.)
• changes in the brain due to past experience which modify the way in which we respond to future experiences even though there is no associated consciously accessible 'memory'. This can include changes in behaviour (such as being able to 'automatically' carry out complex manipulations that initially required careful deliberate attention) and perception (as when we come to immediately recognise images, sounds etc., that once would have just been 'noise' – for example 'seeing' a methane molecule or benzene ring in a representation).
• the ability to mentipulate information consciously – as when we draft text, try to solve a problem, etc. This relies on a facility called working memory.

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Working memory is said to be the key 'bottleneck' in learning?

Working memory has severe limitations, such that most people can only 'juggle' a very small number of pieces of unfamiliar information in working memory at once. It has been strongly argued that this is a very serious constraint on the amount of new material learner can cope with.

It has been described as the bottleneck in the learning system. (Can you rephrase that sentence without using the bottleneck metaphor?)

We might, in scientific terms, relate the role of working memory in cognition to being somewhat like

• the critical factor in a multi-factor process, or
• the limiting reactant in a reaction, or
• the rate determining step in a reaction

Learners must process material in working memory before it can be 'transferred' into long term memory in a form that will allow later recall. So, when teaching, we need to be mindful that only what learners have consciously processed in working memory can be later recalled; and that too much information will overload working memory such that some material will never be processed.

(This is also a necessary but not sufficient condition – what has not been consciously noted in learning will not be available later, but this does not mean anything that is processed in working memory will be readily recalled later – that often depends on further reinforcement in learning and consolidation in memory.)

Memory test

Below are two different lists of ten words. (The images are just there to cover up the words till you are ready to try the activity.) If you were to uncover and read the words (then re-cover them), would you expect to be able to remember the words on a list later?

What if you gave yourself 30 seconds to study a list, then tested yourself by seeing how many of the terms you could remember an hour later, or a day later (or a week later)? If you were scored one point for each correct term (and penalised 1 point for any terms you thought you recalled, but which were not in the list), could you score 10/10? What score would you expect?

Two lists?

Would you expect your score to be very different according to the words in the list?

I have prepared the list with words I expect readers of the book 'Chemical Pedagogy' will be familiar with – so, assuming, we are dealing with familiar words, should it make much difference which words are in the list.

Perhaps you might wish to try the activity before moving on? (The 'slider' acts as a means to move between the two images and cover/reveal the lists).

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list 1:

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list 2:

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Commentary

One list of words was deliberately chosen to be relevant to chemistry teachers. The other list probably seems more arbitrary. (Actually, there is a theme to the words in that list, which some readers may spot – and if so this will likely help those readers recall those words.¹)

If you want some more convincing, here is a list of words which I suspect you could score 10/10 on with very little study!

I assume the words in this list are likely also familiar to readers of a book on Chemical Pedagogy – but I am also assuming something more than this.

A mind reading game

Imagine you had to communicate these lists of words to another teacher of chemistry, but without actually using any of the words listed. How much information would you need to provide (how long would your set of clues be for the first list)? I imagine you would need at least one sentence per word, so a lot more than 10 words!

But I suspect you could communicate the third list with no more that three words! ²

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Chunking:

In learning the term chunking is used to refer to how quite extensive and complex material can be accessed from long-term memory and reflected on in working memory (despite the severe limitations of working memory), as long as that material has previously linked together (chunked) in long-term memory.

Is there a paradox here?

• Material only gets represented in long-term memory after being processed in working memory;
• Working memory can only cope with unfamiliar information in very small 'learning quanta';

but,

• we can access form long-term memory complex and extensive structures built up from many different 'units' of information.

Think of all that know in relation to the periodic table. Imagine if you were to write down everything you know about the periodic table, and consider how many different basic ideas/facts this could be broken down into. (You could try if you wanted to see – I suspect it would be quite a list!)

We even expect school pupils to acquire a network of related ideas about the periodic table.

Each of these links in the concept map shown above reflects a proposition – a sentence in effect – that we would hope the successful learner will integrate into a single network of linked ideas (what we might refer to as a conceptual framework).

But that relies on then learning the ideas over time to build up the structure, and learners making the expected associations when new information was introduced.

This is not a paradox as when learning we can associate new information with what we have already learnt, and so build up complex knowledge structures. But this is not always automatic, and most learners will need teachers to support them in this by the way they structure teaching to regularly reinforce key points from previous teaching and help learners notice and apply links.

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Above I used the infrequent word 'mentipulate'. Perhaps you had not seen that word before? If not, did you understand what it meant? (If so, how did you know what a word you had never seen before meant?)

Did you associate it with the more familiar word 'manipulate', and its relation to 'manual'* as in manual labour? (* a term also used for a handbook)?

Did you associate it with the word mental – as in 'mental arithmetic' and 'mental illness'?

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Representational systems

If you are a science teacher, then you can probably readily 'read' the periodic table, and indeed also know how to 'decode' a concept map. Once you have the expertise to read the periodic table, you may find it very hard to appreciate it at the level of complexity which it presents to a novice learner. But perhaps there are other representations systems where you would be a novice (not knowing how to 'decode' or 'read' the representation), just like a student being introduced to the periodic table for the first time. Perhaps this includes one or more of the following examples:

Images from Pixabay and Wikipedia

If there is an example here which you would not have the slightest idea how to 'decode' (even if you know what kind of representations it is), then perhaps remember that when teaching complex abstract representations like the periodic table.

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Perception

Meaningful images?

The images below have been chosen because they represent objects or events /scenes that may be perceived as meaningful. 

Do these images mean anything to you?

For each image ask yourself
a) what the image means to you
b) whether that meaning is inherent/intrinsic to the object scene shown (would a visitor from Alpha Centauri also recognise it?)
c) i) how do you 'know' what is being represented?
ii) would you always have known?
iii) if not, when did you acquire this knowledge?

This set of images was first put together for a talk given to faculty and students at Universiti Teknologi Malaysia. I suspect that one of these images had more specific associations for those viewers than it will for readers in other parts of the world.

Distorted images

These images below have all been deliberately distorted so that it may not immediately be obvious what they are of. Can you make out what is pictured?

• Immediately?
• Only after some time?
• (If only after some time, is the realisation gradual – or sudden?)

How do you know what is shown in the images – what cues are you using?

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Interpretive resources:

When you read a textbook, or listen to a talk/lecture, or view an image, you make sense of the text because you have available ('in memory') a range of internal resources for interpreting information you see or hear.

Which of the following do you consider might contribute (have contributed) to your 'interpretive resources' for making sense of your experiences? (You may select as many as you feel apply.)

• dictionary definitions
• dreams you have had
• fairy stories heard when young
• folk accounts (folk tales, folklore) of the world
• informal conversations you have had
• now defunct scientific notions (phlogiston, the æther, gravity as a force, atoms as fundamental particles)
• lessons/lectures you may have attended
• iconic images
• movies you have watched
• paintings by art masters
• accounts in classic texts you have never read
• past experiences of acting (doing things) in the world
• political and philosophical perspectives
• television news and documentaries you have seen
• time spent reflecting on things you had experienced/heard/read
• texts you have read

(Perhaps you can think of other resources that I have missed out?)

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Your mind’s eye:

Can you visualise a methane molecule?

If so, is this because you have seen lots of methane molecules? (If not, then how did you manage this?)

What do you think a typical 11 year old would imagine if asked to think about 'a methane molecule'?

I would suggest that most chemists/chemistry teachers immediately (and without deliberate effort) bring images and associations to mind when they read or hear terms like 'methane molecule', 'hydrogen atom', 'aromatic system', 'p-orbital, 'electron lone pair', 'carbonyl group', 'double bond', etc.., although they have never actually seen a single instance of any of these entities.

It is worth reflecting how we move from not knowing anything about such abstract ideas to immediately 'recognising' (and in most cases imagining) and treating representations of them as real and familiar objects.

I would suggest this usually requires some considerable time spent working with such ideas. Is there a danger that these associations come so readily to experts (such as teachers) that we can easily forget how abstract and unfamiliar they are for many learners, even after they have been introduced?

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Bugs in the system?

Teachers teach, and sometimes all of those in the class learn what was intended. However, sometimes, none of the learners quite understand what the teacher is trying to explain. They may be completely confused, or have misunderstood. Perhaps more often, at the end of a lesson or lecture, different students have acquired the intended understanding to different degrees. This is such a commonplace of formal education that it is clear that for a teacher to be well-prepared for class, have a good subject knowledge, and give a clear explanation at an unhurried pace is not (whilst being necessary for effective teaching) not an assurance that everyone will learn what is intended.

Sometimes when teaching goes wrong it may be because of an ill-prepared or stressed-out teacher. Sometimes it will be inattentive, distracted, or tired learners. But to be an effective teacher means to appreciate that failures to effectively teach something are not necessarily the fault of teacher or learners, and it makes more sense to think of teaching-learning as a complex system with much potential for systems-failures.

If we accept that learning abstract ideas in science normally requires the teacher to present material in a way that will help learners build up conceptual frameworks of related ideas, and requires learners to make the expected associations between what is presented in teaching and their prior learning, then can you suggest several ways in which the 'system' can fail to lead to intended learning, even with a good teacher and a motivated student?

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Making the unfamiliar familiar

We might see teaching as the process of making the unfamiliar familiar to learners. Yet, something that is completely unfamiliar may make no sense to us – and chemistry teaching often involves introducing very abstract ideas: oxidation state; aromaticity; transition state; d-orbitals…

So, teachers have various techniques for helping learners make sense of the abstract ideas that cannot be directly demonstrated – we use models and representations and also tricks of language such as similes and analogies.

So, a teacher might try and explain the implications of limited working memory capacity by using an idiom such as it being the 'bottleneck' in the system, or (if we were explaining the idea to chemists) by comparing it to the limiting reactant or rate determining step in a reaction.

Read about idioms used in explaining science

(Note: we should be careful if using idioms with non-native speakers, as often their metaphorical meaning is not obvious to someone who is not familiar with the idiom!)

Read about examples of similes used to explain science

We may even go as far as developing an explicit teaching analogy between the unfamiliar notion and something we think will already be familiar to that group of learners.

Read about examples of scientific analogies

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How many of the words on those three lists above can you recall now?

(If you wanted to achieve a perfect score on all these word lists, you could learn to do so with some practice – but it might require committing some time to repeated exposure and self-testing. And that requires both motivation and metacognitive sophistication.)

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Metacognition

Metacognition is cognition relating to cognition (one's own thinking and learning processes) itself.

So, one has metacognitive knowledge when one has knowledge about one's own cognitive processes. Metacognitive skills are important to effective study (they relate to 'study skills'), as they support self-directed learning.

Some (but not all) of the following statements can be considered to be 'metacognitive'. Like knowledge in general, metacognitive knowledge can be basic or more sophisticated, but it is always related to cognition (thinking, problem-solving, memory, etc.) itself.

• "I scored 67% on the last chemistry test"
• "I listened carefully to the teacher's explanation of redox, but I still do not understand it"
• "I find moles calculations difficult"
• "Carbon has a valency of 4"
• " Entropy is a measure of disorder"
• "I know that carbon has a valency of 4"
• "If I want to revise effectively for my test, I need to actively process the material, not just read and reread my notes"
• "Because carbon has a valency of four, a carbon atom can bond to four other atoms"
• "I know when I am revising I need to take a short break each 30 minutes or I lose concentration"
• "I know that entropy is a measure of disorder"
• "I know what it means to say an element has a valency of 4"
• "The teacher says that redox is a difficult topic"
• "I find moles calculations difficult because I struggle to apply mathematics in science lessons"
• "OILRIG stands for oxidation is loss, reduction is gain"
• "I know I am more likely to complete this homework activity if I can break it down into several smaller tasks"
• "I cannot remember the order of the metals in the reactivity series"
• "In the past I have found that drawing out a concept map helps me understand how the parts of a topic fits together"
• "I know that 'entropy is a measure of disorder' is just a slogan and being able to remember that does not mean I have a deep understanding of entropy"
• "I understand homologous series quite well, but am very confused about thermodynamics"
• "I find moles calculations difficult because I struggle to apply mathematics in science lessons, but it helps if I try to break them down into very small steps"
• "OILRIG is meant to help me remember what happens to electrons during redox reactions"

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¹ The author is of a certain age, and rather partial to 1970's style prog rock!

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² ("f___ t__ a______")

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