Sonja Tack's List: H809

• Social constructivism extends constructivism into social settings, wherein groups construct knowledge for one another, collaboratively creating a small culture of shared artifacts with shared meanings.
• Social constructivism is closely related to Social constructionism in the sense that people are working together to construct artifacts. However, there is an important difference. Social constructionism focuses on the artifacts that are created through the social interactions of a group (Wikipedia is a good example of social constructionism at work), while social constructivism focuses on an individual's learning that takes place because of their interactions in a group.
• arising from the work of Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive development. P
• Social constructivism extends constructivism by incorporating the role of other actors and culture in development.

  • Laurillard's context of learning

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• humans generate knowledge and meaning from their experiences.
• accommodation and assimilation,
• Accommodation can be understood as the mechanism by which failure leads to learning: when we act on the expectation that the world operates in one way and it violates our expectations, we often fail, but by accommodating this new experience and reframing our model of the way the world works, we learn from the experience of failure, or others' failure.
• The critical goal is to support the learner in becoming an effective thinker.
• Dynamic interaction between task, instructor and learner
• web quests
• reciprocal teaching,
• If students have to present and train new contents with their classmates, a non-linear process of collective knowledge-construction will be set up.
• The social constructivist paradigm views the context in which the learning occurs as central to the learning itself (McMahon 1997).
• Cognitive apprenticeship
• dynamic assessment
• The role of the assessor becomes one of entering into dialogue with the persons being assessed to find out their current level of performance on any task and sharing with them possible ways in which that performance might be improved on a subsequent occasion. Thus, assessment and learning are seen as inextricably linked and not separate processes (Holt and Willard-Holt 2000).
• instructors should first introduce the basic ideas that give life and form to any topic or subject area, and then revisit and build upon these repeatedly.
• It is also important for instructors to realize that although a curriculum may be set down for them, it inevitably becomes shaped by them into something personal which reflects their own belief systems, their thoughts and feelings about both the content of their instruction and their learners (Rhodes and Bellamy 1999). Thus, the learning experience becomes a shared enterprise. The emotions and life contexts of those involved in the learning process must therefore be considered as an integral part of learning. The goal of the learner is central in considering what is learned (Brown et al. 1989; Ackerman 1996).
• It is important to achieve the right balance between the degree of structure and flexibility that is built into the learning process. Savery (1994) contends that the more structured the learning environment, the harder it is for the learners to construct meaning based on their conceptual understandings. A facilitator should structure the learning experience just enough to make sure that the students get clear guidance and parameters within which to achieve the learning objectives, yet the learning experience should be open and free enough to allow for the learners to discover, enjoy, interact and arrive at their own, socially verified version of truth.
• Teachers will find that since the students build upon already existing knowledge, when they are called upon to retrieve the new information, they may make errors. It is known as reconstruction error when we fill in the gaps of our understanding with logical, though incorrect, thoughts. Teachers need to catch and try to correct these errors, though it is inevitable that some reconstruction error will continue to occur because of our innate retrieval limitations.
• wondering aloud and posing questions to the students for promotion of reasoning (DeVries et al., 2002). (ex: I wonder why the water does not spill over the edge of the full cup?) Teachers also intervene when there are conflicts that arise; however, they simply facilitate the students' resolutions and self-regulation, with an emphasis on the conflict being the students' and that they must figure things out for themselves.
• It is possible to see social constructivism as a bringing together of aspects of the work of Piaget with that of Bruner and Vygotsky (Wood 1998: 39).

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• relying on a cognitive structure to do so. Cognitive structure (i.e., schema, mental models)
• The instructor and student should engage in an active dialog (i.e., socratic learning)