Identifying the existence of barriers to students’ learning from assessment results

Constructivism is the dominant paradigm in educational psychology at present. According to this theory, learning is an active process of sense-making, which occurs in the mind of the learner as she or he attempts to construct a meaningful representation of new information (Phillips 1995). As a result, instruction aimed at transmitting (intact) a knowledge structure from the instructor to the student will be ineffective. Instead, the learner must build their own structure, or schema, based upon their existing knowledge and understanding (Bodner 1986). There are many different theories of constructivism (Phillips 1995), ranging from the individual-centred radical constructivist position of Von Glasersfeld (1993; 1995) to the group-centred social constructivist position (see Palincsar 1998, for example). However, all such theories share as common features the central position of the learner in sense-making and in building meaningful knowledge schemata.