Asia-Pacific Forum on Science Learning and Teaching, Volume 11, Issue 2, Article 13 (Dec., 2010) Yılmaz CAKICI & Gülben YAVUZ The effect of constructivist science teaching on 4th grade students’ understanding of matter Previous Contents Next

Introduction

Since the seventies, the change from behaviourism to cognitivism in educational psychology has placed an increasing responsibility upon the learners for their own learning, (Chen, 2002) and student-centered teaching has become the focus of many researches. The constructivist approach is based on the premise that science is a human construction. As far as learning is concerned, the constructivist approach accepts that children construct or change their representations about the environment in which they live, mainly through three processes: interaction with adults, interaction with their peers, and their personal experiences (Kokkotas and Vlachos, 1998). In brief, constructivism argues that learners actively construct meaning from existing knowledge structures, and highlights the importance of children’s existing ideas in the teaching process.

Although constructivism is not a theory of teaching, it suggests taking a radically different approach to classroom teaching (Fosnot, 1996). The process of teaching requires children’s existing ideas to be elicited, then challenged and altered, rather than developing a new idea (Osborne, 1996). As Osborne and Freyberg (1985, p.13) pointed out, “unless we know what children think and why they think that way, we have little chance of making any impact with our teaching no matter how skillfully we proceed.” Therefore, the constructivist teaching process involves more student-centered, active learning experiences and more work with concrete materials. Richardson (1997, p.34) emphasis that teachers can facilitate “student-centered learning by providing various activities including demonstrations, diagrams, examples, and images.” In Turkey, the new national curriculum, which has been in practice since 2004, emphasizes classroom teaching using a constructivist approach. The aim of this study is to highlight the importance of constructivist teaching practice in terms of student achievement in the classroom.