CONSTRUCTIVISM

The key concepts of constructivism can be explained in the infographic below.

Constructivism emphasizes the importance of students’ active engagement in the learning process. Learning objectives are student-centered and use the verbs such as “reason,” “reflect,” and “justify."

Constructivism has 3 important ideas "The Zone of Proximal Development", "Scaffolding", and "Social Constructivism". The Zone of Proximal Development or ZPD is the difference between what a learner can do without help and what he or she can do with help (Culatta, 2017). And providing appropriately challenging learning tasks to let learner “stretch” his abilities, seek assistance from others, and grow without becoming frustrated is a good way. Furthermore, learners require the active and the purposeful support of instructors when building on their prior knowledge and schemata. This support is called scaffolding. Learner's reliance on the instructor lessens as learning continues. Social constructivism means that we learn and develop through interactions, with language playing a key role.

THE EXAMPLE OF A LEARNING EXPERIENCE BASED ON constructivism

The learning scenario based on Constructivism is as follows.

Acquiring programming skill with the support from teachers and the other students

Prof. Yasuda is going to teach his students how to make a program using PHP script. At first, he showed the sample program which really works and instructed his students to make a program. Prof. Yasuda observed his students making programs and supported if his students have troubles or cannot make program by providing similar sample codes. Furthermore, students with higher skill will support either. The kind of support differs depending on students and required less support at the end of the class. Furthermore, Prof. Yasuda decided to employ some students from senior programming class as teaching assistants (TAs) to support students when students have troubles.

ZPD for students is the programming skill which can be achieved if Prof. Yasuda and the other students supported them. And scaffolding for students is the sample codes provided by Prof Yasuda which they are trying to make in their programing. Furthermore, supporting from teaching assistants is social constructivist strategy.

Reflecting My learning experience based on Constructivism

★ Please check my learning experience page before reading this paragraph.

Regarding the learning experience in my page, I have never experienced learning activities based on constructivism. However, when I was an undergraduate student in university, I took the class “Speech Analytics” and shared multiple topics with the other students to discuss from linguistic perspectives every week. The knowledge and skills of linguistics differed significantly depending on students. So, discussing with students with higher linguistic skill may scaffolded to acquire more linguistic knowledge and skills.

Culatta, R. (2011). Zone of Proximal Development. Retrieved from http://www.innovativelearning.com/educational_psychology/development/zone-of-proximal-development.html

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