Talk:Constructivism (philosophy of education)

The constructivist teachers are there to aid the children...

"The constructivist teachers are there to aid the children, and provided support to their knowledge acquisition."

I deleted this sentence because it does not communicate sufficiently specific information. However, I would welcome a more precise statement about the goals of constructivist teachers.

Areas of this article that need improvement

The article cites Wertsch (1997) but it does not include this source in the references.

To start with...

• history of constructivist philosphy citing Plato, Locke, Rousseau, Dewey, von Glasersfeld, Bruner, and others.

• clarity about the axioms, or fundamental tenets of constructivism.

• descriptions of the different flavors of constructivist learning theory

• explanation of social constructivism

and also

• the other educational philosophies prevalent at the time that Piaget was attempting to disprove

• the educational movements that used Piaget and Papert's theories to bring about change in education and childcare

• their successes and failures

also and simply

• complete references for the in-text citations ... eg: "Social constructivism views each learner as a unique individual with unique needs and backgrounds. The learner is also seen as complex and multidimensional (Gredler 1997)" .. the Gredler text is not mentioned in the references, certainly not properly according to his name.

Impact of recent student edits

This article has recently been edited by students as part of their course work for a university course. As part of the quality metrics for the education program, we would like to determine what level of burden is placed on Wikipedia's editors by student coursework.

If you are an editor of this article who spent time correcting edits to it made by the students, please tell us how much time you spent on cleaning up the article. Please note that we are asking you to estimate only the negative effects of the students' work. If the students added good material but you spent time formatting it or making it conform to the manual of style, or copyediting it, then the material added was still a net benefit, and the work you did improved it further. If on the other hand the students added material that had to be removed, or removed good material which you had to replace, please let us know how much time you had to spend making those corrections. This includes time you may have spent posting to the students' talk pages, or to Wikipedia noticeboards, or working with them on IRC, or any other time you spent which was required to fix problems created by the students' edits. Any work you did as a Wikipedia Ambassador for that student's class should not be counted.

Please rate the amount of time spent as follows:

• 0 -No unproductive work to clean up
• 1 - A few minutes of work needed
• 2 - Between a few minutes and half an hour of work needed
• 3 - Half an hour to an hour of work needed
• 4 - More than an hour of work needed

Reference problems

I don't know what time exactly "recent" is when students have edited this lemma. I do have some serious issues with two of the references (currently #21 and #22). I have been chasing them down all day and ended up here.

21: Brownstein, Bonnie (22 December 2001). "Collaboration: the foundation of learning in the future". Education. 122 (2).

What journal is that supposed to be? There are so many journals that have Education in the title, but I have been unable to find this. It is quoted all over the place, just like this, but I can neither find the paper nor the journal nor the author. If this is being quoted in the Wikipedia, that means that the editor had access to the article. Please post a link to this article (and not to any of the many online papers from dubious journals that reference this).

22: Rhodes, Lynn K.; Bellamy, G. Thomas (1 January 1999). "Choices and Consequences in the Renewal of Teacher Education". Journal of Teacher Education. 50 (1): 17–26.

I have a copy of this paper, and it has NOTHING to do with constructivism! It talks about teacher training, the word "facilitator" is not even in the paper! Older versions of this Wikipedia Lemma give the quotation as

A teacher tells, a facilitator asks; a teacher lectures from the front, a facilitator supports from the back; a teacher gives answers according to a set curriculum, a facilitator provides guidelines and creates the environment for the learner to arrive at his or her own conclusions; a teacher mostly gives a monologue, a facilitator is in continuous dialogue with the learners (Rhodes and Bellamy, 1999).

This is found verbatim in many of the questionable publications, but has now been re-written at some point for this lemma. It was introduced to the lemma in 2006 [1]. If students have edited this page, that means that they have checked all of the references, but I am assuming not. If it cannot be properly referenced, then it needs to be removed completely, although it is a very nice statement. WiseWoman (talk) 13:35, 14 October 2024 (UTC)