Instructional designers are expected to be familiar with the epistemological underpinnings of several theories and their consequences on the process of instruction. Constructivism is the dominant theory of the last decade and supports construction of knowledge by the individual. This paper discusses the basic principles underlying constructivism, particularly active, collaborative and authentic...

Education has long been driven by its metaphors for teaching and learning. These metaphors have influenced both educational research and educational practice. Complexity and constructivism are two theories that provide functional and robust metaphors. Complexity provides a metaphor for the structure of myriad phenomena, while constructivism provides a metaphor for learning. In the synthesis of ...

The topic of this essay is the metaethics of practical reasons, with special focus on a view I call " constructivism ". Because this term is rather promiscuous , it seems best for me to characterize the view I'm talking about right off the bat. As I understand it, constructivism is characterized by three central tenets. The first of which runs as follows: Truth-Apt: normative judgments are trut...

In educational discourse on human learning (i.e., the result of experience) and development (i.e., the result of maturation), there are three fundamental theoretical frameworks, -behaviourism, cognitivism, and constructivism, each of which have been applied, with varying degrees of success, in online environments. An ecological framework of human learning and development in interactive learning...

As stated in the introduction, we believe social constructivism can provide crucial direction for preservice education and we see evidence of it in the strong, innovative programs described in this book. But what exactly is meant by this term? As Richardson (1997) notes, constructivist teaching is not “a monolithic, agreed-upon concept” (p. 3). It is often barely understood, or actually misunde...

In this paper I dispute the current view that intuitionistic logic is the common basis for the three main trends of constructivism in the philosophy of mathematics: intuitionism, Russian constructivism and Bishop’s constructivism. The point is that the so-called ‘Markov’s principle’, which is accepted by Russian constructivists and rejected by the other two, is expressible in intuitionistic fir...

Constructivism has recently gained popularity, although it is not a completely new learning paradigm. Much of the work within e-learning, for example, uses constructivism as a reference “discipline” (explicitly or implicitly). However, some of the work done within the simulation gaming (SG) community discusses what the basic assumptions and implications of constructivism for SG are. Constructiv...

In a recent issue of this MONTHLY, Fred Richman [8] discussed existence proofs. Richman’s conclusion, as I understood it, was that once a mathematician sees the distinction between constructive and nonconstructive mathematics, he or she will choose the former. That conclusion, if extrapolated further than Professor Richman intended, suggests that any mathematician can learn constructivism easil...