Given the incompatibility of minimally guided instruction with our knowledge of human cognitive architecture, what has been the justification for these approaches?
The most recent version of instruction with minimal guidance comes from constructivism (e.g., Steffe & Gale, 1995), which appears to have been derived from observations that knowledge is constructed by learners and so (a) they need to have the opportunity to construct by being presented with goals and minimal information, and (b) learning is idiosyncratic and so a common instructional format or strategies are ineffective.
The constructivist description of learning is accurate, but the instructional consequences suggested by constructivists do not necessarily follow.
Most learners of all ages know how to construct knowledge when given adequate information and there is no evidence that presenting them with partial information enhances their ability to construct a representation more than giving them full information.
Actually, quite the reverse seems most often to be true.
Learners must construct a mental representation or schema irrespective of whether they are given complete or partial information.
Complete information will result in a more accurate representation that is also more easily acquired.
Constructivism is based therefore, on an observation that, although descriptively accurate, does not lead to a prescriptive instructional design theory or to effective pedagogical techniques (Clark & Estes, 1998, 1999; Estes & Clark, 1999; Kirschner, Martens, & Strijbos, 2004).
Yet many educators, educational researchers, instructional designers, and learning materials developers appear to have embraced minimally guided instruction and tried to implement it.
Another consequence of attempts to implement constructivist theory is a shift of emphasis away from teaching a discipline as a body of knowledge toward an exclusive emphasis on learning a discipline by experiencing the processes and procedures of the discipline (Handelsman et. al., 2004; Hodson, 1988).
This change in focus was accompanied by an assumption shared by many leading educators and discipline specialists that knowledge can best be learned or only learned through experience that is based primarily on the procedures ofthediscipline.
This point of view led to a commitment by educators to extensive practical or project work,and the rejection of instruction based on the facts, laws, principles and theories that make up a discipline’s content accompanied by the use of discovery and inquiry methods of instruction.
The addition of a more vigorous emphasis on the practical application of inquiry and problem-solving skills seems very positive.
Yet it may be a fundamental error to assume that the pedagogic content of the learning experience is identical to the methods and processes (i.e., the epistemology) of the discipline being studied and a mistake to assume that instruction should exclusively focus on methods and processes.
Shulman (1986; Shulman & Hutchings, 1999) contributed to our understanding of the reason why less guided approaches fail in his discussion of the integration of content expertise and pedagogical skill.
He defined content knowledge as “the amount and organization of the knowledge per se in the mind of the teacher” (Shulman, 1986, p. 9), and pedagogical content knowledge as knowledge “which goes beyond knowledge of subject matter per se to the dimension of subject knowledge for teaching” (p. 9).
He further defined curricular knowledge as “the pharmacopoeia from which the teacher draws those tools of teaching that present or exemplify particular content” (p. 10).
Kirschner (1991, 1992) also argued that the way an expert works in his or her domain (epistemology) is not equivalent to the way one learns in that area (pedagogy).
A similar line of reasoning was followed by Dehoney (1995), who posited that the mental models and strategies of experts have been developed through the slow process of accumulating experience in their domain areas.
Despite this clear distinction between learning a discipline and practicing a discipline, many curriculum developers, educational technologists, and educators seem to confuse the teaching of a discipline as inquiry (i.e., a curricular emphasis on the research processes within a science) with the teaching of the discipline by inquiry (i.e., using the research process of the discipline as a pedagogy or for learning).
The basis of this confusion may lie in what Hurd (1969) called the rationale of the scientist,which holds that a course of instruction in science should be a mirror image of a science discipline, with regard to both its conceptual structure and its patterns of inquiry.
The theories and methods of modern science should be reflected in the classroom. In teaching a science, classroom operations should be in harmony with its investigatory processes and supportive of the conceptual, the intuitive, and the theoretical structure of its knowledge. (p. 16)
This rationale assumes that the attainment of certain attitudes, the fostering of interest in science, the acquisition of laboratory skills, the learning of scientific knowledge, and the understanding of the nature of science were all to be approached through the methodology of science, which was, in general, seen in inductive terms. (Hodson, 1988, p. 22)
The major fallacy of this rationale is that it makes no distinction between the behaviors and methods of a researcher who is an expert practicing a profession and those students who are new to the discipline and who are, thus, essentially novices.
According to Kyle (1980), scientific inquiry is a systematic and investigative performance ability incorporating unrestrained thinking capabilities after a person has acquired a broad, critical knowledge of the particular subject matter through formal teaching processes.
It may not be equated with investigative methods of science teaching, self-instructional teaching techniques, or open-ended teaching techniques.
Educators who confuse the two are guilty of the improper use of inquiry as a paradigm on which to base an instructional strategy.
Finally, Novak (1988), in noting that the major effort to improve secondary school science education in the 1950s and 1960s fell short of expectations, went so far as to say that the major obstacle that stood in the way of “revolutionary improvement of science education … was the obsolete epistemology that was behind the emphasis on ‘inquiry’ oriented science” (pp. 79–80).
Source : https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1207/s15326985ep4102_1?needAccess=true
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