ABSTRACT
The decline of positivism during the latter half of the 20th century facilitated the development of constructivism in various forms as an alternative philosophical and educational theory (Louden & Wallace, 1994). Most science educators would agree that during the 1970s and the 1980s, among other forms of constructivism Piagetian and Ausubelian constructivism played a dominant role. Piagetian constructivism emphasized the need for going beyond expository teaching practice in order to facilitate development of reasoning based on the learning cycle. In contrast, Ausubelian constructivism promoted meaningful receptive learning based on prior knowledge of the students and concept maps. Since then, constructivism in science education has developed in many forms by drawing inspiration from various philosophical and epistemological sources (Geelan, 1997; Good, 1993; Phillips, 1995). Of the different forms, radical (Glasersfeld, 1989) and social constructivism (Glasson & Lalik, 1993; Tobin & LaMaster, 1995) have enjoyed more popularity with science educators. For radical and some social constructivists, experience is the ultimate arbiter for deciding between scientific theories and how students acquire knowledge. Despite the popularity, almost all forms of constructivism have also been the subject of scrutiny and critical appraisal (De Berg, 2006; Geelan, 2006; Kelly, 1997; Matthews, 1993; Niaz, 2001d; Osborne, 1996; Phillips, 1995; Solomon, 1994; Suchting, 1992; Taber, 2006). An important aspect of the development of different forms of constructivism in science education is the need for a continual critical appraisal. Early debates (Novak, 1977) provided the stimulus for this continued progressive development. More recently, Nola (1997) has emphasized that popular forms of constructivism (radical and social) will have to compete and often unfavorably with rival views. Competition between rival theories, tentative nature of science and theory-ladenness of observations are important contributions of the new philosophy of science, which has permeated science education research (Lederman, Abd-El-Khalick, Bell & Schwartz, 2002). Tsai (2006) has emphasized the importance of these aspects of nature of science for constructivism and teacher
training programs. Table 11.1 provides an outline of the tentative nature of science in the two domains, namely, atomic structure and constructivism in science education. At this stage it is important to note that the different forms of constructivism in science education have as much to do with the different psychological models of teaching and learning (developmental stage theory, socio-cultural, motivational perspectives, etc.) as with different views on scientific epistemology. Kitchener (1986) an important scholar on genetic epistemology has expressed this in cogent terms, “Piaget attempts to explain the growth of knowledge as Popper and Lakatos do, by providing a rational reconstruction of the course of epistemic change in which transitions occur by virtue of certain normative principles” (p. 210). Similarly, Pascual-Leone (1987), a leading neo-Piagetian psychologist, has emphasized the constructive perspective which:
presupposes that subjects construct their own world of experience (objects, events, transformations) by means of cognitive structures and organismic regulations/factors. This constructed world, however, is valid only if it epistemologically reflects distal objects, distal events and transformations actually occurring in the environment.
