Learning, motivation and theory

After reviewing Chapter 11 of Foundations of Learning and Instructional Design Technology, I faced some difficulties in grasping the concept of Constructivism in learning. According to the textbook, constructivism is described as a method of learning that “creates meaning from experience”, I found this explanation to be confusing since behaviorism can also be described in a similar way based on my learning.

To better understand this concept, I set out to create a mini-course for myself with the help of ChatGPT, this was the prompt I used:

“Create a mini-course for me to understand the concept of Constructivism using Constructivism
ONLY 10 MINUTES
ONLY 3 ITEMS”

ChatGPT gave me the following plan to go through

• Spark & Surface: Describe what learning is to me
  • “Learning happens when a teacher influenced a student’s perceptions to reflect concepts of the world surrounding them”
• Contrast & Construct: Describe why the scenario “students build a spaghetti bridge in teams” would lead to a deeper learning experience
  • Item 1: Students collaborate with each other to challenge other teams’ understanding of how a bridge is constructed, leading to better iterations of the bridge
  • Item 2: Students constantly challenge each other’s understanding in their own team, leading to more experimentation of each other’s concepts, seeing each other’s failures and successes
• Map & Reflect: Mapping notes to keywords schema, scaffolding, dialogue; reflecting on any change to my perception of learning
  • Item 1 – schema, dialogue; item 2 – schema, scaffolding
  • My original perception has changed a bit: “Learning happens when students are allowed to experiment with their perceptions of the world, and adjust accordingly based on failures”

Figure 1: Students constructing a spaghetti bridge

After going through this experience, I now see the different between Constructivism, Behaviorism and Cognitivism; and understand what Constructivism is. Constructivism ask the core question of how learners would build their own meaning to concepts, organizing experiences into mental models. Behaviorism looks more into shaping the learner’s behaviors and Cognitivism is about changing how the mind process information.