Educational Psychology Third Edition Kelvin Seifert and Rosemary ...

2. The learning process
The other major psychological perspective—constructivism—describes how individuals build or “construct”
knowledge by engaging actively with their experiences. Psychological constructivism emphasizes the learners’
individual responses to experience—their tendency both to assimilate it and to accommodate to it. Social
constructivism (or sociocultural theory) emphasizes how other, more expert individuals can create opportunities for
the learner to construct new knowledge. Social constructivism suggests that a teacher’s role must include
deliberate, scaffolded dialogue. It also needs to include deliberate instructional planning, such as facilitated by
Bloom’s taxonomy of learning objectives. Both of these strategies can promote students' metacognition, or ability to
monitor their own learning. Psychological emphasizes the teacher's responsibility for arranging a rich learning
environment and for emphasizing rich sensory, motor, and concrete experiences wherever possible.
Further resources
Behavioral Theory and Practical Learning Issues
This page lists several materials and links about
several forms of behavioral theory (not only operant conditioning), as well as activities and links related to fostering
study skills.
More about How Constructivism Works
This page lists activities that illustrate typical features of thinking as interpreted from a psychological constructivist
perspective. There is less here about social constructivism than about psychological constructivism.
Key terms
Appropriate (as a verb)
Behaviorism
Bloom’s taxonomy
Classical conditioning
Constructivism
Psychological constructivism
John Dewey
Jean Piaget
Assimilation
Accommodation
Equilibrium
Schema
Social constructivism
Jerome Bruner
Instructional scaffolding
Lev Vygotsky
Zone of proximal development
References
Discrimination
Extinction
Extrinsic motivation
Generalization
Learning
Intrinsic motivation
Metacognition
Operant conditioning
Cue
Operant
Reinforcement
Schedule of reinforcement
Ivan Pavlov
Readiness
B. F. Skinner
Transfer
Alberto, P. & Troutman, A. (2005). Applied behavior analysis for teachers, 7 th edition. Upper Saddle River,
NJ: Prentice Hall.
Anderson, L. & Krathwohl, D. (Eds.). (2001). A taxonomy for learning, teaching, and assessing: A revision
of Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives. New York: Longman.
Bruner, J. (1960). The process of education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bruner, J. (1966). Toward a theory of instruction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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