Page 10 - Mini-Module 12

3. Construction of syntactic knowledge

The syntactic structures in Liberal Studies refer to the central role that
enquiry plays in the learning process, where the interplay between the
subject matter and the students’ thinking takes place systematically.
Having a firm grasp of the syntax of Liberal Studies, teachers realize
that the complex problems in a selected issue may be remote from the
experience of the students. To help students establish the conceptual
matches, teachers have to provide intervention or inputs by creating
learning contexts or environments that activate students’ cognitive
processes toward the construction of meaning.

Taken as a whole, teachers with insufficient syntactic knowledge of
Liberal Studies may encounter difficulties with creating learning
contexts or environments systematically that enable students to make
productive use of their prior learning and cognitive strategies to
construct meaning within a content discipline. As a consequence, it
would be hard for learning to take place when their students, being
unable to understand and interact meaningfully with the material or
experience provided, fail to undergo the cognitive processes in
constructivist learning. Provided that teaching does not start where the
learner is functioning, this barrier to constructivist learning may appear
in any instructional approaches. On this account, the centrality of the
issue regarding teacher knowledge in an issue‐enquiry of Liberal
Studies is not merely knowledge of pedagogy, but also “knowledge of
learners and learning” (Grossman et al., 1989). With this type of
knowledge, teachers would consider their students’ cognitive and
developmental stage when designing and presenting cognitive and
social tasks. The following will discuss some instructional strategies to
prime constructivist learning with due regard to students’ cognitive
stage:

To facilitate student learning in an issue‐enquiry, teachers may provide
scaffolds (e.g. Rosensgine & Meister, 1992; Rasmussen, 2001) in the

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