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Full-Text Articles in Education
Constructivism And Instructional Design: Some Personal Reflections, Brent Wilson
Constructivism And Instructional Design: Some Personal Reflections, Brent Wilson
Brent Wilson
Some personal reflections on instructional design and its relation to constructivism are explored. Instructional design in its present form is out of sync with the times in that its orientation, methods, and research base are behavioristic, or positivistic. However, a constructivist theory of instructional design is possible, particularly if constructivism is recognized as a philosophy rather than a strategy. To better fit the needs of practitioners, instructional design theories need to be better grounded in a broad understanding of learning and instructional processes. Generic principles and specific heuristics are needed for dealing with recurring problems and situations in instructional design …
Riding The Mathematical Merry-Go-Round To Foster Conceptual Understanding Of Angle, Ron Tzur, Matthew Clark
Riding The Mathematical Merry-Go-Round To Foster Conceptual Understanding Of Angle, Ron Tzur, Matthew Clark
Ron Tzur
This article presents playful activities for fostering students' conceptual understanding of angle--a root concept in mathematics--that revolve around the Mathematical Merry-Go-Round game. The authors focus on activities for two reasons. On one hand, NCTM's Principles and Standards for School Mathematics (2000) stresses the central role of student activity in coming to understand mathematics. This emphasis is consistent with a constructivist stance (Piaget 1971) about learning as an active process. On the other hand, typical activities used for teaching angle, in which an introduction of the definition is followed by operations on angles, such as measuring, adding, comparing, and classifying, seem …