Went to a Fight and a Conference Broke Out: Instructivism vs. Constructivism

One of my stat profs loved academic arguments. He enjoyed reading journal articles arguing different points of view. He especially enjoyed going to conferences and watching other stat profs fight over the minutiae of their field. One of his anecdotes centered on a conference where the book The Bell Curve was a featured topic. “People were screaming at one another,” he noted with glee. Good stuff!

Academic arguments, my professor maintained, are where new knowledge and ideas are tested, refined, and eventually accepted or rejected once the dust settles. Like a schoolyard brawl, people come running far and wide just to watch. Well, at least those in that field of academia do.

Currently an academic skirmish is in full swing over a paper published a year ago that strongly attacked constructivist learning. I have to speak in broad generalities here, but basically constructivists believe learning can be facilitated through the student creating her own knowledge. A constructivist would say: you can tell a student something all day, but if she discovers it on her own it will hold a much more powerful impression. Also, learning by doing will always be stronger than passive approaches.

An instructivist believes the teacher must guide the child in learning. An instructivist would say: you have to tell the student what he needs to know. Otherwise, how do you know he’s learning what you want him to know? He can’t get there (at least, not efficiently) unless you show him the way.

Probably most learning takes place somewhere between the two camps, and in truth many people likely fall on a spectrum between the two extremes. Nonetheless, slavish adherents exist on both sides, ready to rail against the other side’s philosophical position.

Constructivist learning is generally promoted in university education departments. In K-12 settings, where high stakes examinations at the state level are so important, instructivist learning dominates. The thinking here is, if students are to pass the state exam they must be directly taught what is on the state exam. So, instructivism dominates in schools.

At this point it may be prudent to note that, broadly speaking, folks involved in educational gaming tend to fall in the constructivist camp. One of the underlying assumptions of serious/educational/instructional games is that the whole videogame structure is one offering high engagement for potential learners. Thus, while some games are designed to “trick” players into picking up knowledge or skills (the hidden agenda approach), others are more overt in their pedagogy while couching objectives in an experiential gaming environment. But, they all assume players will engage in the game rather than passively consume information such as that transmitted in a lecture.

So with that as background, we come to our current fight. The paper in question is by Paul A. Kirschner, over at the Educational Technology Expertise Center, Open University of The Netherlands and Research Centre Learning in Interaction, Utrecht University, The Netherlands; John Sweller over at the School of Education, University of New South Wales; and Richard E. Clark, over at the Rossier School of Education at University of Southern California. The paper’s title is a shot across the bow of constructivist teaching: “Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work: An Analysis of the Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-Based, Experiential, and Inquiry-Based Teaching.” It appeared in Educational Psychologist last year, but as in so many other things with educational publishing, its impact is only now being fully felt.

Clark was involved in the famous Clark-Kozma Debate. This academic argument played out in the pages of Educational Technology Research and Development (ETR&D) and elsewhere, with Clark stating that, all things being equal, information transmitted via whatever media would not result in significant differences in outcomes at test time. Thus, info transmitted during a live lecture, or via videotape, or via audio recording, or through text … all would result in similar scores when subjects were tested on the information. Clark called this the delivery truck metaphor. Media is essentially the delivery truck, and it affects content no differently than real delivery trucks affect theirs. Kozma, for his part, felt Clark was painting with too broad a brush.

Clark has joined Kirschner and Sweller in the current debate. Several academics have taken exception to the arguments outlined in their paper. The most prominent is Stephen Downes over at the National Research Council Canada, Institute for Information Technology. Downes has linked a video of a lecture he gave addressing identified shortcomings in the paper on his main site, downes.ca. In addition, on his Half an Hour blog, Downes has posted the back and forth between him and Kirschner over debated details. He lists his arguments against the paper here. Finally, he has a long post called Kirschner, Sweller, Clark (2006) – Readings, that lists an extensive set of comments from people across academia and the blogosphere who have opined on the paper.

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We’ll see what happens when the dust settles. Personally, I’m a fan of constructivist teaching when possible and practical. Many times when teaching to the test as required in our schools these days, a constructivist lesson is not the most efficient way to impart knowledge. But, there are times when a constructivist approach leads to profound and life changing lessons. The constructivist approach is especially useful for those “fuzzy” lessons that defy standardization such as on ethics, leadership, and social factors.

I’ve also noticed, especially with computer programs, few people want to “take the time” to read the manual. Instead, they’d rather jump right into the program and start figuring things out. I would say these people are eschewing the instructivist approach in favor of a constructivist one. In fact, one is hard pressed to find a substantial written instruction manual included with software programs these days. There may be online help included, or a brief “getting started” document. But, instructivists must resort to buying separate books for extensive program manuals. There is a lesson there, somewhere …

References
Clark, R.E. (1994). Media will never influence learning. Educational Technology Research and Development, 42(2), 21-29.

Kirschner, P.A., Sweller, J., & Clark, R.E. (2006). Why minimal guidance during instruction does not work: An analysis of the failure of constructivist, discovery, problem-based, experiential, and inquiry-based teaching. Educational Psychologist, 41(2). 75-86.

Kozma, R. (1994). A reply: Media and methods. Educational Technology Research and Development, 42(3), 11-14.

Games In Education: An Interview with Eva Zadeh

Earlier in the semester, I was contacted by grad student and freelance writer Eva Zadeh and interviewed by e-mail for a paper on which she is working. I thought Zadeh’s questions were good ones on the topic of educational videogames, and she agreed to let me put my answers in this blog. Here, then, is the interview. (I’ve since brushed up my responses, but the content is substantially the same.)

Q: Why is it important to put video games in classrooms?
A: The question is still out as to whether or not video games are important for classroom use. Certain media hold advantages over other media, depending on the situation. For instance, books are good for preserving dense information. Lectures are good for transmitting brief information quickly. Videogames are good for simulated experiences that can be pedagogical in some way.

The best place for videogames may well be in after school or extracurricular programs where time is not as limited and there is less concern about traditional testing. This is backed up in Squire’s dissertation, and elsewhere.

Q: For how long have you been working on educational video games? Is it something new?
A: I’ve centered my doctoral work around educational videogames. In that regard, I’ve been in the field personally only a few years. I think Marc Prensky helped popularize the idea of instructional videogames with his book in 2001. I think James Paul Gee helped popularize the idea in the educational research establishment with his book in 2003.

Some might say that instruction through videogames has been occurring since videogames first appeared. They were introduced (although via tube technology and not true vector graphics that some folks define as video) at the Brookhaven Nuclear Laboratory in the 1950s.

Personally, I think the notion of instruction through gaming received its biggest boost when Microsoft introduced Windows Solitaire. This game “trained” computer users on a mouse. Up to that time, PC users mostly navigated without a mouse. Windows required a mouse for some activities. Folks who had never used a mouse before became quite proficient after a few rounds with Windows Solitaire.

Q: I read in one of your papers that it was “widely believed that much more learning can take place within active environments.” How widely? Numbers? Since when?
A: This is a key question for which we are awaiting more empirical data. As frustrating as that might be, one of the even more fundamental questions yet to be resolved is, What should we measure? If we are going to measure test scores, I suspect that videogames won’t show any more improvement than any other program or product. My personal theory on improved test scores is, it doesn’t matter what product is used. What matters are the teachers, and what they do to get students to learn. The product matters little, in my opinion, other than to help promote an initial burst of enthusiasm.

Now, the idea that active environments promote learning more than static ones falls back on constructivism, and that opens up another can of worms altogether. Constructivists will always come down on the side of active environments, with or without empirical data to back them up. There may well be some research on what students learn through active environments as opposed to static ones. I recall a survey of students who went through an interactive museum exhibit versus those going through static exhibits. If memory serves, the interactive group enjoyed their experiences more, although they came away with knowledge of fewer facts.

I believe the quote in question was a synthesis of arguments by Squire and Jenkins, from the Insight journal, around 2003. Since then, much more attention has been paid to the field, with multiple journal articles and research in both education and the medical field. One of the better summaries of papers detailing benefits of educational videogames down through the years can be found in Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen’s article, “Third Generation Educational Uses of Computer Games,” in the latest issue of Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia. See Table 1 for his list.

Q: Video games are said to be more engaging. Where does that theory come from? Situated learning? Or something else? Role of the teachers and books?
A: I would argue videogame interaction is self evidently more interactive than sitting through a lecture. I have proposed a means of estimating the higher thinking potential of any game, in a paper published in January this year in the Journal of Technology and Teacher Education. This involves a melding of Bloom’s Taxonomy to videogame interaction. The article is entitled, “Assessing Higher Order Thinking in Video Games.”

As for the roles of teachers and books, some of the largest ongoing experiments have used both extensively with videogame environments. Indiana’s Quest Atlantis makes heavy use of hybrid learning, and the virtual world itself is quite text intense. In fact, I have discussed this with one of the lead developers, Dr. Scott Warren, now at UNT. My premise: Quest Atlantis is really a highly digitized, interactive text environment. If memory serves, Dr. Warren agreed, although he noted that much more than reading is involved with Quest Atlantis.

Nonetheless, text plays a key role in many of these games, which require reading and typing in order to engage in the environment. Books and teachers will never relinquish their key roles in the classroom. Videogames will increasingly offer supplemental educational vehicles, giving teachers additional resources to use in and out of the classroom.

Q: How do you measure the efficiency of video games in classrooms?
A: Again, efficiency of what? Efficiency of increasing knowledge? Higher test scores? Do videogames fall under the same media umbrella that other media do in Clark’s “delivery truck” argument, where he asserted media is immaterial in delivering the content? Or, do the interactions within games result in higher engagement and additional intrinsic motivation to discover new knowledge inside and outside the game, and school?

Q: Have scientists worked on the impact of learning through video games on the kids’ brains?
A: The major work in the hard sciences have centered around visual plasticity (Green & Bavelier) and glucose levels (Haier). Prensky is best known for postulating the digital natives / digital immigrants divide, but showed little in the way of experiments to back up the claim. Rosser showed that hand-eye coordination from videogame play has real world applications in modern surgery. Farrace-Di Zinno demonstrated that boys diagnosed with ADHD were more still and focused while engaged in videogames.

So, something is going on in the brain. Measuring the impact is somewhat difficult. Haier’s work with PET scans dates back to 1992, so at some point somebody will probably build on that work and give us a more detailed look at what is going on inside the brain during game play.

Here are the citations to the works above:
Farrace-Di Zinno, A.M., Douglas, G., Houghton, S. Lawrence, V., West, J. & Whiting, K. (2001, November). Body movements of boys with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) during computer video game play. British Journal of Educational Technology 32(5). 607-618.

Green, C.S., Bavelier. D. (2007). Action-video-game experience alters the spatial resolution of vision. Psychological Science 18(1), 88-94.

Haier, R. J. (2003). Positron emission tomography studies of intelligence: From psychometrics to neurobiology. In Nyborg, H. [Ed.]. The scientific study of general intelligence — Tribute to Arthur R. Jensen. 41-52. New York: Pergamon.

Prensky, M. (2001a, September/October). Digital natives, digital immigrants. On the Horizon, 9(5), 1-6.

Prensky, M. (2001b, November/December). Digital natives, digital immigrants, part 2: Do they really think differently? On the Horizon, 9(6), 1-6.

Rosser, J.C., Lynch, P.J, Cuddihy, L., Gentile, D.A., Klonsky, J., Merrell, R. (2007, February). The impact of video games on training surgeons in the 21st Century. Archives of Surgery, 142(2). 181-186.

Q: What perspectives do you see for the future? Do you see any evolution in the field?
A: A defining groundwork, where everybody agrees to the same set of definitions, will help. I think we’ll see much more empirical data come out of the medical literature, with applications for education. Finally, we need a really killer app for education that meets the needs I spelled out at AECT 2005: a product with an appropriate cognitive load for students, aligned to standards, with problem solving germane to the subject; probably built on a rich 3D environment, and easily customizable by the teacher. I think we see a lot of this already in teachers tweaking the Neverwinter Nights engine for their own classroom use, but it takes an inordinate amount of time programming that game. If something out there could be offered that was easier for teachers to use in the classroom, I think considerable interest among educators and researchers would follow.

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Zadeh’s questions were good ones, and I enjoyed having to think about the topics she brought up, and justify some of my positions in the field. All told, it was a very thoughtful exercise, and I appreciated the opportunity to respond.