Paradigms Regained: Toward Integrating Objectivism and Constructivism in Instructional Design and the Learning Sciences

Abstract

This article proposes a model that integrates the traditionally conflicting objectivist and constructivist approaches to instructional design. I argue that these two approaches are complementary rather than oppositional. I present and analyze two learning programs in order to show how learning events can contain both objectivist and constructivist elements. By plotting the two approaches at right angles to one another, I produce four quadrants which I then discuss and explain. What follows after that is a discussion of comments that were received from members of a prominent instructional technology mailing list about the feasibility of the model. Finally I present two case studies. The first describes a two-day workshop that was designed to be high on both axes, while the second shows how the model could be used as a decision-making tool. Initial findings suggest that it is both feasible and useful to plot objectivism and constructivism at right angles to one another rather than at opposite ends of a continuum.There has been considerable debate over the past few years about the traditional practice of labeling approaches to learning as either objectivist or constructivist. The implication of this is that the two terms are exclusive and that the pendulum of fashion or emphasis swings periodically from the one extreme to the other. Practitioners will then support either one approach or the other, or else they may advocate taking a middle path (Cook

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