Science & Education 9: 599610, 2000. 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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Constructivism in School Science Education: Powerful Model or the Most Dangerous Intellectual Tendency?
E. W. JENKINS
School of Education, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK (e.w.jenkins@education.leeds.ac.uk)

Abstract. This paper explores and challenges a number of the assumptions and claims commonly associated with a constructivist approach to school science education, e.g., that constructivist ideas about learning require a progressive pedagogy or that active learning demands engaging students with practical activities. It suggests that constructivist ideas have a particular appeal within primary education because they help to justify classroom practices and activities that primary school teachers, for a variety of other reasons, regard as important. It is suggested that the recent dominant emphasis upon constructivism in science education has narrowed both the professional and the research agenda relating to school science teaching. The paper argues for greater clarity and precision when referring to constructivist ideas in science education and for a better understanding of the role that learning theories should play in inuencing the ways in which science is taught in schools. Key words: Constructivism, teaching, learning, science The constructivist view of teaching and learning has proved to be a powerful model for describing how conceptual change in learners might be promoted. Keogh and Naylor 1997, p. 12 [Constructivism is a candidate for] the most dangerous contemporary intellectual tendency . . . [because] it attacks the immune system that saves us from silliness. Devitt 1991, p. ix

1. Introduction The two quotations above clearly imply different estimations of constructivism as a contemporary intellectual phenomenon and it is possible to make at least some attempt at reconciliation only by acknowledging that the authors are writing from different standpoints, namely those of pedagogy and learning theory on the one hand and of philosophy on the other. The philosophical dimensions of constructiv-

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ism have generated a substantial and still burgeoning literature and several scholars have written about constructivism in science education from a philosophical point of view, with Matthews providing a convenient and up-to-date introduction to the eld (Matthews 1998). This paper is concerned with what might be called the implications of constructivism for science education and, more particularly, with the claims made for it as a theory of teaching and learning. Some of these claims can hardly be described as modest, e.g., Children learning science through the constructivist approach are noticeably different from children learning by a more passive method (Wadsworth 1997, p. 24) and Learning science and doing science proceed in the same way (Harlen 1996, p. 5). It is, of course, acknowledged that, in some form or other, constructivist perspectives have inuenced contemporary intellectual debate in elds as diverse as literature, the arts and the social and natural sciences. It is also acknowledged that a constructivist stance in education is often bound up with political, ethical or moral claims, especially when constructivist ideas are intimately linked with such issues as the emancipation of student learning, socially empowering groups or individuals, having respect for students or their ideas, or, as the above quotation from Wadsworth indicates, the promotion of a child centred/progressive pedagogy. These claims are not examined in detail in this paper, although some reference to them will be made. There is little doubt that constructivist ideas in some form have come to dominate much of educational discourse, if not necessarily practice. Phillips has commented that Across the broad elds of educational theory and research, constructivism has become something akin to a secular religion. Noting that whatever else it may be, constructivism is a powerful folk tale about the origins of human knowledge, he adds that Like all religions, [it] has many sects1 each of which harbors some distrust of its rivals (Phillips 1995, p. 5). Fensham has identied the constructivist view of learning as the most conspicuous psychological inuence on curriculum thinking in science since 1980 (Fensham 1992, p. 801), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science has described the widespread acceptance of constructivism as a paradigm change in science education (Tobin 1993). Wadsworth, writing of primary teacher education in the UK, claims that constructivism is generally accepted by teacher educators as the most effective way of teaching the ideas of science (Wadsworth 1997, p. 23). Duit and Treagust, taking a wider perspective, assert that constructivism has the ascendancy among learning theories in the 1990s, acknowledging that in the United States the earlier emphasis had been upon behaviourist approaches to learning (Duit and Treagust 1997, p. 3).

2. Responding to Constructivist Claims A not inconsiderable difculty in responding to many of the claims made on behalf of constructivism within science education is the difculty of knowing what interpretation to give to constructivism or constructivist ideas when used in this

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context. There are many variants of constructivism and the educational literature on constructivism has been described as enormous and growing rapidly (Phillips 1995, p. 5). In addition, debates that are ostensibly about teaching or learning readily become confused with others that are essentially epistemological or philosophical disputes about the nature of science, of scientic knowledge, or about the existence of an external reality which it is the business of science to describe. Phillips, in a valuable attempt to impose a degree of conceptual order among the various constructivist sects, draws a distinction between those who focus their attention on the cognitive contents of the minds of individual learners and others who emphasise the growth of the public subject-matter domains, adding a third category of brave groups who tackle both thus doubling the amount of quicksand to be negotiated (Phillips 1995, pp. 56). To further complicate matters, constructivists who focus their attention upon, for example, how individuals learn, may differ quite profoundly about the mechanisms they suggest are involved. Piaget and Vygotsky . . . gave quite different accounts of this matter; one stressed the biological/psychological mechanisms to be found in an individual learner, whereas the other focussed on the social factors that inuenced learning. (Phillips, op. cit., p. 7) If there is common ground among constructivists of different persuasion it presumably lies in a commitment to the idea that the development of understanding requires active engagement on the part of the learner. Put another way, knowledge cannot be given or handed over and received in the same way as a parent might give a child a book, a toy or a tool. When characterised in this way, constructivism has a long ancestry and accommodates considerable exibility, with even someone like John Locke admitted to the constructivist camp by allowing that the mind can put together those ideas it has, and make new complex ones (Locke 1947, p. 65). What this characterization means for teaching and learning, however, is by no means as straightforward as many of those arguing for constructivist approaches to teaching and learning commonly assume, imply or assert. The notion of the mind actively constructing knowledge does not, for example, lead in any logical way to a rejection of the world as an external reality. Nor does it require the problematic idea that science education is about making sense of the world rather than about establishing a valid scientic understanding of natural phenomena. More than enough has now been written to expose the subtlety and complexity of scientic ideas and their frequent divorce from common-sense understanding and experience (e.g., Wolpert 1992). To establish heliocentricity or to prefer uniform motion in a straight line to rest in understanding the Newtonian universe involves more than making sense of the world, unless this phrase is asked to bear a greater and more qualied meaning than is usually the case. From this perspective, progressivist claims such as children are natural scientists and everyone engages in scientic activity during the course of their everyday activities are not only beguiling but, from the point of view of science education, misleading.

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Care is also need in coupling so-called constructivist learning and teaching, as in the rst quotation at the head of this article. A theory of teaching (however that may be dened) is necessarily more complex than a theory of learning, not least because it must accommodate what is known about a range of matters not embraced by studies of how students learn. In addition, while the large volume of empirical data about students understandings of a range of scientic phenomena (see, for example, Pfundt and Duit 1994) is of interest, comparatively little is known about how teachers can most effectively respond to it (Claxton 1986). For example, are eliciting and reorganising students ideas to be seen as distinct steps or, as some writers suggest (e.g., Harlen 1996) better regarded as part of a continuous process? The pedagogical consequences of having elicited students ideas are also far from clear. Likewise, are ideas, once elicited, meant to assist a teacher to plan what he or she must now do in response or is their principal purpose to help students clarify their own thinking? In more general terms, the question being asked here is what, in practical terms, is a science teacher to do if, as constructivism would seem to dictate, he or she must take students existing ideas into account in planning science teaching activities? Certainly, students understandings of natural phenomena are to be valued and treated with respect, and, in many cases, they can be used as a starting point for a range of activities ranging from class discussion to experimental work in the laboratory. If the students understandings of natural phenomena are wrong, science teachers would argue that they are to be corrected.2 Constructivism, however, offers little in the way of guidance about how this may best be done, despite the fact that a range of so-called constructivist curriculum materials have been produced (Driver and Oldham 1985). Science evolved very late in human history and it seems more than optimistic to assume that young students can construct scientic explanations simply by observing phenomena and generating and testing hypotheses. Even if this were possible, the question would remain of whether engaging students in the necessary practical activities is the most efcient way of promoting their learning. It is also important to ask what it is that constructivist teachers wish their students to construct during the course of their science lessons. If it is assumed that one purpose, perhaps the principal purpose, of school science education is to help students learn some of the ways in which the scientic community understands the natural world, then what is to be constructed by students is not simply the understanding that might ow from their interactions with a range of natural phenomena. The signicant omission, as Driver et al. have acknowledged, is students interactions with symbolic realities, the cultural tools of science (Driver et al. 1994, p. 7). Rectifying this omission has a number of implications for what might be called nave constructivist approaches to teaching science. It requires an acknowledgement of the importance of expert scientic knowledge on the part of the teacher, and it shifts the debate away from learning as an individual construction towards learning as a social activity, i.e., towards so-called social constructivism. What remains a matter for debate, however, is the way in which the expert scientic

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knowledge of the teacher can be most effectively deployed to help students learn something of the ways in which the world is understood by the scientic community. Solomons comments are of interest here. In a perceptive article, entitled The Rise and Fall of Constructivism, she suggests that constructivism obscures other perspectives, and offers an alternative picture of pupil learning. . . . a young student sits outside a circle of disputing scholars picking up fragments of conversation and trying to piece them together. Once we were all that child, the family was the circle, and we turned over the phrases that we heard until they built up into an idea. We tried out the sense of it, and occasionally we were amusingly wrong. If we were lucky, no one laughed. Then it was explained once more in helpful ways and with good games to go with the learning of it. When we tried it again and the half-formed idea seemed to be accepted by others, it became stronger. Kindly adults encouraged us to use it in new ways: our understanding and pride in using it grew. The idea gradually became ours, and, by the same token, we became part of the privileged and knowing circle who used it. (Solomon 1994, pp. 1718) It is perhaps signicant that much of the research that has been done within the misconceptions tradition has been concerned with concepts such as force, energy, power, gravity or mass, in which everyday words and notions are given highly specialised and often mathematical meanings within a scientic context. It is not difcult, indeed it is to be expected, that young peoples own experiences will have led them to have ideas about at least some of these concepts. It is more difcult, however, to understand how young students might have developed an out-of school understanding of concepts such as ion, electromagnetic radiation, oxidation, free energy or chemical equilibrium. With these, and many other scientic concepts far removed from everyday experience, eliciting students ideas becomes more difcult, if not impossible. This, of course, does not mean that it is no longer possible or desirable for a teacher to engage in a conversation with students, to explore analogies intended to promote intellectual growth, to probe their understanding, or to challenge their assumptions, arguments or conclusions by whatever strategies he or she judges to be effective. Such strategies, however, depend upon constructivist ideas only to the extent that they acknowledge that learning requires the active engagement of the learner. Equally, a constructivist view of learning does not demand a pedagogy that might be described as progressive, any more than active learning necessarily entails engaging students in practical activities. If, as constructivism requires, learning presupposes the active engagement of the mind of the learner, then the notion of passive learning lacks meaning. As any teacher knows, it is possible to engage the minds of learners by a wide variety of teaching strategies, some of which might be described as formal and didactic, rather than informal and exploratory. Indeed, selecting a strategy that is more, rather than less, likely to interest students and promote their learning is central to a teachers professional competence.

604 3. The Prominence of Constructivism in Science Education

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It is pertinent to ask why constructivist assumptions and claims have come to gure so prominently in much of the professional and academic literature of science education, especially that relating to the education of children of primary school age. Writing of primary science education in the UK, Harlen has claimed that the SPACE Project3 was largely responsible for bringing "constructivism" into common discourse in primary science teaching, although, like many ideas in education, it had roots in earlier work, particularly that of Piaget (Harlen 1997). In the present context, the validity of this claim is less important than the issue of why constructivism has become part of the common discourse to which Harlen refers. It has been suggested elsewhere (Jenkins and Swinnerton 1998, p. 223) that in the case of primary science education, constructivist ideas may simply be being raided to sustain classroom practices and activities (such as group work and projects) that many primary school teachers, for a variety of other reasons, regard as important. These activities and practices (conveniently, if unhelpfully) are sometimes labelled progressive, and, in England and Wales they derive most recently from the work of Susan and Nathan Isaacs and from the appropriation of aspects of Piagetian psychology for pedagogical purposes during the 1960s and beyond. More particularly, the constructivist requirement to engage the learner actively in learning has been used to justify engaging students in practical and investigative activities of various kinds. In addition, the beguiling, if erroneous, parallels sometimes drawn between the construction of personal knowledge by the learner and the generation of scientic knowledge have been used (Jenkins and Swinnerton 1998) to ally constructivism with discovery learning and with the teaching of science by investigation4 (Indeed, if knowledge construction is seen as an entirely individual matter, then any distinction between constructivist pedagogy and discovery learning becomes difcult to sustain.) From all these perspectives, most types of constructivism are modern forms of progressivism (Phillips 1995, p. 11). Some caution is needed, however, to avoid over-estimating the impact of constructivist ideas upon practice in the primary classroom or, indeed, at other levels of education. Sizmur and Ashby (1997) found that few teachers elicited young childrens views about natural phenomena in any systematic way when introducing them to scientic concepts, and Larochelle and Bednarz (1998, p. 3) have commented that . . . taking students knowledge into account seems to have scarcely modied the usual teaching modus vivendi at any level of instruction one chooses to examine. Murphy, following a study of local primary school teachers, has reported that Some teachers were not convinced about a constructivist approach, in particular whether it was appropriate for all ages. Others had never heard of constructivism but were nevertheless committed to investigative learning where the children had freedom in the practical sense to decide what

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they wanted to nd out and how to set about doing it. Some described a constructivist approach as the children doing the doing. Those who had heard of the term were usually strong advocates of the approach and described it as children building on their previous experience through practical investigation, learning through investigation, open learning situations within the classroom. (Murphy 1997, pp. 2728) A frequent claim of those who invoke constructivist ideas to justify a progressive pedagogy is that other forms of teaching either fail or result in learning that is pejoratively described as supercial, shallow or short-term. A constructivist approach, in contrast, is sometimes said to lead to real understanding or to long term learning. It is not clear what empirical or other evidence exists or might exist to substantiate claims of this kind, but, whatever the evidence, it will remain important to ask whether the classroom activities and practices promoted by those who advocate a constructivist pedagogy to introduce pupils to scientic concepts and ideas can be justied in terms of the time and resources associated with them. As one teacher educator, concerned about the pressures on the science component of the primary curriculum in England and Wales, expressed it, When do I tell them the right answer? (Wadsworth 1997, p. 23). It is not surprising, therefore, that much constructivist writing about school science argues for a reduction in scientic content or demands an assessment technology that is more sympathetic to a constructivist approach. 4. The Issue of Multiple Understandings Like all who teach science, those who espouse a constructivist approach are faced with the overwhelming evidence that many children retain erroneous commonsense or everyday understandings of a number of scientic phenomena, despite all attempts of science teachers to effect change. For example, students who engage with problems in Newtonian terms in the classroom or laboratory often resort to discredited Aristotelian notions when asked to explain similar problems involving force or motion encountered in an everyday, out-of-school, context. For constructivist, and perhaps for all, teachers, there seems to be both a problem and a challenge here. The problem is the persistence of erroneous ideas among students who, having been well-taught, ought to know better. The challenge seems to lie in helping students develop a more consistent scientic understanding of the natural world. Many constructivists have taken this challenge seriously with some arguing for cognitive conict i.e., placing a student in a position in which the application of his or her own understanding to a problem leads to cognitive difculties which the student must then resolve. One of the difculties of this approach, the problem of knowledge in context, is discussed below. A further difculty arises when, as seems to be the case, all forms of conceptual change are regarded as equally difcult and likely to be effected by some common constructivist pedagogy. Ex-

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perience in the classroom suggests that, to the contrary, some forms of conceptual change can be brought about much more easily than others, much depending upon the complexity of the scientic ideas and the extent to which they are counterintuitive. Thus, most secondary school pupils are likely to nd greater difculty with the ideas surrounding the motion of projectiles than they are with the notion that light travels in straight lines and can be reected by a plane mirror. To the extent that this is the case, the constructivist view of teaching and learning is likely to encounter some difculty as a powerful model for describing how conceptual change in learners might be promoted. In addition, the notion that students, and, more generally, adults, should always explain natural phenomena in terms that accord fully with the canon of scientic knowledge presents problems. Phrases like the sun rises in the east, feed the plants and keep out the cold persist in everyday use, even though the heliocentric universe makes a nonsense of the rst and, in scientic terms, plants make their own food and cold has no scientic meaning save an absence of heat. Moreover, as work in the public understanding of science has revealed, the seemingly straightforward application of scientic knowledge in the world far removed from the laboratory can sometimes be misleading and unhelpful (Irwin and Wynne 1996) and there may be good reasons for its rejection in favour of other, more local or personal knowledge and understanding (Layton et al. 1993). Even among those with a scientic background, outdated scientic ideas may still be used because they adequately serve the purpose in hand. Heating engineers, for example, commonly discuss heat transfer in terms of ow rather than of molecular motion. What is being suggested here is not that common sense or everyday knowledge should always be valorised over scientic knowledge or that all forms of knowledge are always of equal worth. Common sense or everyday knowledge is sometimes wrong and occasionally dangerously so. The particular point is simply that each of us, in our everyday activities, is usually content to use a model which seems adequate for the purpose we have in mind. The model may draw upon a variety of sources but it will always be tested against experience. This, of course, does not make it true, even though, because it works, it may seem so. As noted above, it is on this issue that those who equate constructivist science education with helping students to make sense of the natural world run into some difculty. The more general point is captured by Bachelards notion of a conceptual prole (Bachelard 1968) which acknowledges that individuals have a variety of models of, i.e., ways of thinking about, natural events and phenomena. For example, a physicist who works professionally with quantum models of matter is likely, in other contexts, to invoke the notion of matter as a continuum and, in most everyday practical activities, act on this latter basis. This notion of a conceptual prole, allied with the outcomes of much research into the way in which citizens interact with scientic knowledge, constitutes a direct challenge to the notion that learning science can, or should, be reduced simply to a matter of replacing students misconceptions/alternative conceptions by more orthodox scientic understandings.5

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It is also, of course, a challenge to other, more traditional approaches to teaching school science. 5. Conclusion The preceding paragraphs suggest that constructivism in science education is neither a powerful model for describing how conceptual change in learners may be promoted nor the most dangerous intellectual tendency. Within the literature relating to school science education, the impression is rather one of confusion and often uncritical espousal of a fashionable research paradigm. In addition, constructivism has acquired something of a Humpty Dumpty quality.6 If the on-going debate about teaching and learning in school science is to become more focused, attention to language would seem to be something of a priority. For example, students ideas about natural phenomena are too glibly described as theories, a description which implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, suggests unhelpful and misleading parallels with scientic theories. Likewise, distinctions often need to be drawn between the guesses which students may make in seeking to explain some phenomenon and scientic hypotheses. Equally important is the need to be clear about the nature of, and the evidence for, the various claims put forward under the umbrella of constructivism. Are these claims, for example, about the nature of knowledge, about how children can be most effectively taught, about the existence of an external reality, or about the locus and nature of scientic or pedagogical authority? Even when these claims are related to each other, important distinctions need to be made, although it would be foolish to suggest that all of the issues involved are capable of unequivocal resolution. It would also be helpful to know more about the role that theories of learning have played, and might properly be expected to play, in inuencing the ways in which science is taught in school. This is a complex and largely unexplored eld and one that is likely to reveal signicant differences between countries and between primary and secondary schooling. Behaviourist ideas for example, which have exerted a powerful inuence in the USA, have had much less impact on teaching in England and Wales, and, in general, the discourse of primary teaching has been more accommodating of theories of learning than is the case at the secondary level where subject disciplinary considerations have held much greater sway.7 An overview of the position with respect to primary/elementary science education in England and Wales has been provided by Jenkins and Swinnerton (1998), but any historical study is necessarily limited by the difculty of addressing satisfactorily the gap between pedagogical rhetoric and the reality of classroom practice. In 1967, the Plowden report, usually regarded as a seminal inuence on primary education practice in England and Wales, noted of the early twentieth century that A considerable body of liberal thinking on the education of children was available to teachers. Rousseau, Pestalozzi, Froebel, Whitehead, Dewey, Montessori and Rachel Macmillan, to mention only a few, had all written

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on lines that encouraged change and innovation. Yet it may be doubted whether the direct inuence of these or of any other writers was great. (Central Advisory Council 1967, pp. 189190). Only two years earlier, however, the leaders of the Nufeld Junior Science Project were arguing that We must be able to justify all that we advocate on psychological grounds. More than this: we need to look at all we plan to do in relation to what is known of childrens learning processes. No one who is not prepared to accept this idea should be involved in the scheme! (Nufeld JSP 1965, p. 3). It is perhaps important to note that any study of the inuence of theories of learning on science teachers practice in the classroom and laboratory will have considerable political resonance since it is likely to be intimately related to the battle between progressive and traditional approaches to teaching. It is also important to acknowledge that the attention devoted to constructivism in school science teaching may have served to narrow the professional and the research agenda within science education. While recognizing some of the benets that have owed from constructivist ideas, notably the emphasis placed upon the learner, Solomon warns of tunnel vision among some researchers within the constructivist tradition, and notes, with OLoughlin (1992) that Mature constructivism tends to abrogate all avenues of research to itself (Solomon 1994, p. 17). Woolnough, from a different perspective, claims that One of the problems about constructivism, and other theories of learning, is not that they get the answers wrong but that they ask the wrong questions! They seek to answer the question how do pupils learn? What we ought to be asking is what makes students want to learn? (Woolnough 1998, p. 17) It is difcult to avoid the conclusion that the answer to Woolnoughs second question is likely to be of more immediate and practical use to science teachers than any constructivist response to the rst. Notes
1 Phillips language is, of course, emotive and pejorative. For a more generous account of the

diversity of interpretations of constructivism, together with a scholarly exploration of the reach of constructivist ideas within education, see Larochelle et al. (1998). 2 It is acknowledged that, for many, perhaps all, constructivists, constructivism requires teachers and learners to devote attention to how we know what we know (Larochelle and Bednarz). While this has an obvious relevance to school science teaching, its implications are somewhat eccentric to the principal focus of this article and are not discussed here. 3 Science Processes and Concepts Exploration Project. 4 They have also prompted studies that explore the relationship between the history of scientic ideas and students contemporary understanding of a range of natural phenomena. 5 For some constructivists, this issue is one of developing new forms of discourse. See Gee (1996). 6 When I use a word, Humpty Dumpty said . . . it means just what I choose it to mean neither more nor less (Lewis Carroll).

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7 For most of the second half of the 19th century, much of the debate about school science teaching

centred on whether, for example, heat should be taught before light, or static electricity before current electricity. When, early in the following century, ideas about childrens intellectual development replaced those drawn from faculty psychology to become part of educational thinking, H. E. Armstrong, the advocate of the heuristic method of teaching science, complained that The damned boy (sic) needs drilling. We forget this and ever twaddle of playing on his interests (Armstrong 1924, quoted in Brock 1973, p. 145).

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OLoughlin, M.; 1992, Rethinking Science Education: Beyond Piagetian Constructivism Towards a Sociocultural Model of Teaching and Learning, Journal of Research in Science Teaching 29, 791820. Pfundt, H. & Duit, R.: 1994, Bibliography of Students Alternative Frameworks and Science Education, 4th edn., Institute for Science Education, Kiel. Phillips. D. C.: 1995, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: The Many Faces of Constructivism. Educational Researcher 24, 512. Sizmur, S. & Ashby, J.: 1997, Introducing Scientic Concepts to Children, NFER, Slough. Solomon, J.: 1994, The Rise and Fall of Constructivism Studies in Science Education 23, 119. Tobin, K. G. (ed.): 1993, The Practice of Constructivism in Science and Mathematics Education, AAAS Press, Washington DC. Wadsworth, P.: 1997, When Do I Tell Them the RIGHT ANSWER?, Primary Science Review 49, 2324. Wolpert, L.: 1992, The Unnatural Nature of Science, Faber and Faber, London. Woolnough, B. E: 1998, Learning Science is a Messy Process, Science Teacher Education 23, 17.