International Seminar on 

Vidya Bhawan Society, Udaipur

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At its heart Constructivism seems to stress subjectivism - that learners individually and actively construct their own knowledge from their own experiences resulting in a personally unique representation of reality; and relativism - that all such constructions of reality are a priori equally valid and one version may be preferred over another only if it finds greater social acceptability. However a wide spectrum of beliefs subsists under the common rubric of constructivism - from merely positing that knowledge can only be acquired by an individual learner through personal cognition, to asserting that although an external reality may exist the knowledge that is constructed by an individual can never be an accurate representation of the external reality, to maintaining that all knowledge is social in nature and is therefore bound to a specific culture. Given this melange, it is not easy to pinpoint what constructivist pedagogy is, particularly if we bear in mind that constructivism is a theory of knowledge acquisition and not of pedagogy.

   From the point of view of science education, what is of value in constructivism is that it has encouraged enquiry into what intellectual baggage learners bring with them to the classroom, which in turn has revealed the existence of misconceptions or alternative conceptions in the minds of students which are intuitive, universal and extremely resistant to change. Even after formal instruction, the naïve theories that learners construct on their own coexist, side-by-side, with the more scientifically correct theories, in two seemingly separate and minimally connected compartments of the mind which get accessed independently depending on the nature of the interrogation. These misconceptions are of interest as they may provide points of departure for more a more successful scientific pedagogy so that identifying them and establishing their universal nature is a matter of some priority in pedagogical research.