The Relevance of the Constructivist Approach to Education.

"Multiple Intelligences After Twenty Years". - Howards Gardner

Found at: http://www.pz.harvard.edu/PIs/HG_MI_after_20_years.pdf

In this paper Gardner reflects on the origins and basis of his Theory of Multiple Intelligences. He describes some of his background as a psychologist that may have led to this theory and the many books he wrote.

It becomes very clear that the way he worked was to develop a theory and then go out and test it. He then would be looking for endorsement of his theory in all the experients he did rather than have the results of the experiments determine the next experiment and subsequently, the theory.

Piaget wrote of the different developmental stages of the child and this certainly could be looked at with the question of "Does the developmental stage fit with the outcomes of the ICT program proposed?"

Vygotsky's ideas centred around social interactions as a means for expanding the zone of proximinal development. He appears to refer to actual human to human contact rather than a text or blog interaction but with a bit of a stretch I suppose you could call these digital interactions "social".

Bruner looked at the structure of the content and context of the information presented. ICT does lend itself to this type of approach where structure is very flexible and presentation options are vast.

Gardner looked at education and intelligences in a much broader view and considered the various different intelligences. He looked beyond the IQ type tests which he considered as polarised towards verbal, logical-mathematical and spacial. Perhaps some of his theory of other intelligences does not quite fit into an ICT environment (eg bodily/kinesthetic) whereas other parts (eg visual/spatial with 3D graphics, music with online audio and intrapersonal with bloggs and chat) may apply.

From my experience, the idea of having one "theory" of how all or groups of individuals learn and then fitting then all into those groups is very limiting, narrow and unrealistic.

Gardner attempted to do this with his "Multiple Intelligences". My experience tells me that in a particular field a student may use their verbal intelligence particularly well and in another area the same student may be very logical-mathematical (or a mixture of all or any intelligences). I suppose that it is then left up to the teacher to observe this and make adjustments as required.

Many years ago I did a personal development course called "Money and You" with Robert Kyosaki. One of the games we played was to do a particular test on our own, then do the same test in a group with others. The results were mixed and inconclusive. Some people did much better on their own than in a group (me), for some it made little difference and others did better in groups. I know for a fact that in some tasks I do work better in groups. The conclusion could easily be that there is no clear conclusion that can be drawn from this except that everyone has their own preferred way of dealing with life.

In a distributed learning environment the question arises then, do you group a student who is well ahead with someone a bit slower or do you group the advanced students together? If you do the former, will the advanced student get bored and the other student get frustrated? If you do the latter will both students compete and attempt to "outdo" each other?

The concept of a distributed learning environment in my opinion is simply a reflection of reality and perhaps how apprentices learn from tradesmen. Here then could be the answer to how to group learners of different levels. Those that are behind will learn from the advanced and the advanced will learn, but not necessarily content, from those behind. This idea fits nicely with Vygotsky's concept of social interactions as a means for learning. However it does bring into question not all apprentices get on with the tradesman teaching them.

Does a computer fit into this concept of learning? Like all situations, the answer would be "it depends". For some students computers may be new (something to be explored), others it may be the unknown (something to be feared) or a playground (something to play with) and yet others it may be boring (something to be challenged). So really, simply the concept of using a computer may be an issue for the student even before the content is reached.