Ontario Teachers' Understanding and Practices of Reform Instruction: A Case Study of Constructivism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Since the development of the theory of constructivism from the work of educators Piaget, Brunner and Vygotsky, constructivism has also influenced pedagogical practice. Unlike the traditional approaches of teaching, constructivism encourages learners to construct their own knowledge and take control of their own learning. Although constructivism is widely accepted among teachers, teachers may have misunderstanding/misinterpretation of constructivism which leads to teaching practices that devalue students’ prior knowledge and experiences. This qualitative study examined elementary school teachers’ understanding and practice of constructivism. Data were collected from semi-structured interview, classroom observations, and analysis of teachers’ lesson plans. Findings from the interview showed that teachers understood constructivism as one of many theories that guide their teaching. Classroom observations showed that teachers practiced many approaches including teacher-centered. Teachers also had different understanding/different interpretation of constructivist principles such as knowledge collaboration, authentic activities, problem-solving, and teachers’ role as coaches. Constructivist principles such as metacognition, apprenticeship, and exploration were absent from teachers’ practices. Consistency and inconsistencies was also noticed among teachers.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.029 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".