Academic Understanding and Contexts to Enhance It: A Perspective from Research on Student Learning

The theme of this volume is The Design of Constructivist Learning Environments. To begin, we need to explore why we might need such environments in education, and then to identify research findings which might guide the establishment of such environments. Nancy Cole (1990) has recently criticized schooling in the USA for overemphasizing the acquistion of knowledge and basic skills to the detriment of higher-order skills and advanced knowledge. She comments: Students can repeat science facts and principles, but in explanations of events, they fail to use them. They also fail to use them in new, relevant, problem situations.… Conceptions of educational achievement — how we view and characterize achievement — affect what teachers teach and how they teach it.… Present conceptions of educational achievement as basic skills and facts tend to focus attention on the shortterm goals of schooling.… We must have conceptions … that help us attend to the long-term goals (with) some flavour of the higher-order skills and advanced knowledge. …We have under-emphasized (both) the associative uses of schooling (increasing the web of associations students have) and the interpretive uses (translation of ideas, giving meanings). (pp. 2, 4, 6)