Computers and Education: A Cultural Constructivist Perspective

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.The general topic of the use of computers in education has not been systematically dealt with in the Review of Research in Education, although some specific aspects of it have been touched on (e.g., Sherrie Gott's chapter on apprenticeship and intelligent tutoring systems in Volume 15). Since the field is so vast, no review could do justice to it; thus, we must circumscribe the research we are reviewing to a manageable portion.Our major restriction is that we concentrate on Grades K-12 with an emphasis on late elementary school and early secondary school ages, including higher levels of the education system only in a few cases to illustrate a point. Within this still-vast field we select some research that has been widely disseminated, and therefore characterizes the field, and some research that, in our view, holds special promise for the future. Also, we come to this topic from a particular theoretical perspective, which acts as a further filter on the topics discussed.We call that perspective cultural constructivism. The basic idea of this approach can be grasped most readily by contrasting it with Piagetian constructivism.Piaget is justifiably famous for demonstrating the need to consider children to be constructors of their own development through their actions. By contrast, a cultural constructivist approach assumes not only an active child but an equally active and usually more powerful adult in interaction (we are speaking of educational settings). Moreover, cultural constructivism emphasizes that all human activity is mediated by cultural artifacts, which themselves have been constructed over the course of human history.The general framework of this approach is derived from the axioms of the cultural-historical school of psychology, which asserts that the unique character of human activity is that it is mediated through socially con-191 This content downloaded from 128.42.202.150 on Sun, 26 Jun 2016 20:31:54 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 192 Review of Research in Education, 18 stituted, and historically developing, systems of artifacts (see Wertsch, 1985, for a general treatment).From this perspective, the historically conditioned forms of activity mediated through computers must be studied for the qualitatively distinctive forms of interaction that these artifacts afford and the social arrangements that they help to constitute. Moreover, one is encouraged to seek explanation of current uses of computers in terms of the history of the technology and the social practices that the technology mediates; one needs to consider the "effects" of interacting in this medium not only as they are refracted through transfer tests or in local activity systems (such...

Learning Physics in Context: A study of student learning about electricity and magnetism

“…In the 1990's a variety of efforts expanded Piaget's notion of constructivism (Scott et al 1992, Coburn 1993.…”

Professional Self-Efficacy Scale for Information and Computer Technology Teachers: Validity and Reliability Study

“…Once a society recognizes the value of computer use in education also it achieves an awareness of qualitative development of social dynamics (Scott et al 1992). Perhaps, it is the reason why the integration of technology into educational policy took the lead for a long time (Armfield 2010).…”

Textbooks and Constructivist Pedagogy in Saudi Arabian School Classrooms

“…Much of this research was conducted within specific subject matter areas, where teachers and researchers focused on individual classrooms and small groups of students, including the fields of math (Simon, 1995;Pirie & Kieren, 1992;and Kroesbergen et al, 2004), science (Rezaei & Katz, 2002), special education (Grobecker, 1996), grammar (Blyth, 1997), computers (Scott et al, 1992), physical education (Chen, 2002), and reading (Fink, 1995). Collectively these studies represent a period of experimentation, where attempts to translate the theory of learning into a theory of teaching were tried out and studied.…”

“…More recently, educators have incorporated other, more fundamental theories of learning into "constructivism", a theory that places relatively heavy emphasis on how learners learn, and therefore, how they can best be "taught". Developed as a theory of learning over the last two decades of the 20 th century, constructivism has received increasing acceptance among educators across grade levels (Fink, 2003;Fink, 1995;Wright, 2008;Su, 2007) and subject matter fields (Simon, 1995;Scott et al, 1992;Alharbi, 2004;Blyth, 1997;Chen, 2002). In contrast to the implied emphasis of more traditional learning theories which view learning mainly as a process of transferring knowledge to the learner and reinforcing that transfer, constructivism views learning as a process of active building and developing knowledge and meaning by the learner.…”