This article offers a brief response to Hine’s article, “On Reading the Stamford Papers on Constructivism: A Physicist’s Reactions” (1993, pp. 45–47).

This paper is a report of a study conducted with preservice elementary teachers at the University of Wyoming during the summer of 1993. The study had two purposes: (1) to observe the effectiveness of using a constructivist approach in teaching mathematics to preservice elementary teachers, and (2) to focus on teaching probability using a constructivist approach. The study was conducted by one instructor in one class, The Theory of Arithmetic II, a required mathematics class for preservice elementary teachers.

Key words: educational methods, teacher education, concept formation, constructivist teaching, preservice teacher education, problem solving, classroom techniques, mathematical concepts, teacher education programs

Expressions like “constructivism,” “construction of knowledge,” “learners construct meaning,” and similar ones are starting to become part of the language of science education. We are liable to hear them in professional meetings or inservice workshops and to read them in articles in the professional journals. As the term constructivism becomes more widespread, different people tend to use it with slightly different meanings, and some use it in a loose way to designate a complex of different pedagogical, psychological, or philosophical tendencies. (The ideas about constructivism explained in this chapter are in no way to be taken as an attempt to define the “orthodoxy” of constructivism. Consistent with a constructivist view, they are simply a model of what it means to know. The claim of this model is to be a viable view of knowledge. This chapter aims at presenting the model and exploring from there some relations with teaching and learning of science.) These tendencies seem to have in common the central assumption that all we come to know is our own construction.

Excerpt: Although I do not agree with the author’s claim that the schema mechanism corresponds to Piaget’s constructivist theory, I nonetheless consider Drescher’s approach as a kind of Constructivism and his research as a pioneering contribution to the application of Constructivism in AI tasks.

There are many varieties of epistemological and cognitive constructivism. They have in common an appreciation of the failures of centuries of attempts to realize a correspondence notion of truth and representation, and they all propose some constructivist programme as an alternative. The programmatic proposals, however, can differ greatly. Some contemporary constructivisms that are being vigorously advocated propose a social form of idealism with a consequent relativism. Such proposals risk giving constructivism a bad name. The main burden of this article is to show that such an idealism and relativism is not forced by constructivism, but, instead, is the result of an additional and questionable presupposition. Constructivism per se is a strong epistemological position that is fully compatible with realism.

Key words: cognition, constructivism, correspondence, encoding, epistemology, idealism, realism, relativism, representation

This article reviews recent work in socio-historical technology studies. Four problems, frequently mentioned in critical debates, are discussed – relativism, reflexivity, theory, and practice. The main body of the article is devoted to a discussion of the latter two problems. Requirements for a theory on socio-technical change are proposed, and one concrete example of a conceptual framework that meets these requirements is discussed. The second point of the article is to argue that present (science and) technology studies arc now able to break away from a too academic, internalistic perspective and return to the politically relevant “Science, Technology & Society” issues that informed much of this work more than a decade ago.

The new discipline of cybernetics expanded exponentially in the period 1943–70. Unlike traditional scientific disciplines, its practitioners claimed (to varying degrees) that they were producing a new universal science. This paper anatomizes the claim to universality, details some rhetorical strategies used to support that claim, and examines some practical consequences for the general economy of the sciences argued by cyberneticians. It concludes by characterizing cybernetic strategies in terms of a form complementary to the obligatory passage point – the ‘distributed passage point’.

From the perspective of second order cybernetics this paper examines in which respects psychology can claim to be a science. It focuses on the limits of mechanistic description in the behavioral sciences. Through the Danish psychologist Iven Reventlow’s works, the article analyzes the use of the Galilean concepts of law in psychology. Reventlow attempts to create basic methods and concepts for a Galilean (law determined) psychology in the tradition of Kurt Lewin through work with animal models in the tradition of ethology. His standard experimental model is the male Stickleback guarding its nest – a small fish in its partly self-created world. Reventlow’s aim is to describe the “behavioral personality” of the organism keeping description and causal analysis and explanation on the behavioural level. To this end he works with a statistical model which do not hide the individuals characteristics by rolling them into an average. In this process, however, he finds that he cannot make a final separation of the organism and the environment. It is not possible to carry through either the mechanistic or the dualistic point of view. This finding is discussed in the light of von Foerster’s and Maturana’s second order cybernetic positions on the observer, observation, autopoiesis and the multiverse. The limitations of these theories carries the analysis further. A realistic, non-reductionistic and constructivistic viewpoint is developed from some of N. Luhmann’s formulations.

Excerpt: In this book, you will read about five overarching principles evident in constructivist classrooms. • Teachers seek and value their students’ points of view. Teachers who consistently present the same material to all students simultaneously may not consider students’ individual perspectives on the material to be important, may even view them as interfering with the pace and direction of the lesson. In constructivist classrooms, however, students’ perspectives are teachers’ cues for ensuing lessons. • Classroom activities challenge students’ suppositions. All students, irrespective of age, enter their classrooms with life experiences that have led them to presume certain truths about how their worlds work. Meaningful classroom experiences either support or contravene students’ suppositions by either validating or transforming these truths. • Teachers pose problems of emerging relevance. Relevance, meaning, and interest are not automatically embedded within subject areas or topics. Relevance emerges from the learner. Constructivist teachers, acknowledging the central role of the learner, structure classroom experiences that foster the creation of personal meaning. • Teachers build lessons around primary concepts and ‘‘big” ideas. Too much curriculum is presented in small, disconnected parts and never woven into whole cloth by the learner. Students memorize the material needed to pass tests. But many students, even those with passing scores, are unable to apply the small parts in other contexts or demonstrate understandings of how the parts relate to their wholes. Constructivist teachers often offer academic problems that challenge students to grapple first with the big ideas and to discern for themselves, with mediation from the teacher, the parts that require more investigation. • Teachers assess student learning in the context of daily teaching. Constructivist teachers don’t view assessment of student learning as separate and distinct from the classroom’s normal activities but, rather, embed assessment directly into these recurrent activities.