Limitations

It appears that each individual must learn on his own and nobody can do it for him (or her). The meaning attributed to knowledge cannot be directly transmitted. Only the learners themselves can elaborate their own meanings, compatible with what they are, and through their own experience.

Active and inquiry methods are no simple solution to this problem, however, as they have several limitations (see below).

Everything does not simply depend on general cognitive structures. > The more a situation differs from mastered knowledge, the more we use primitive reasoning strategies.

Knowledge is not always automatically appropriated via “reflective abstraction” (Piaget) > Deconstruction of the learner's concepts should be a previous stage. > Construction and deconstruction are interactive processes. New knowledge is only really installed when previous knowledge is deleted.

Constructivists isolate the individual learner. > They minimize the role of the environment. > They ignore the fact that development takes place within society. Cultural environments help provide meaning to situations.

The different facets of constructivism are largely silent on the contexts and conditions which favor learning: - idea of “maturation,” natural development, or “equilibration.” - “co-action,” “cognitive conflict” or “conceptual changes.” > Such projects still poorly indicate the required situations or resources when facing the complexity of integrated education.

Main limitations of the constructivist models

The learner has a specific mode of explanation - called conceptions - which determinates the way it decodes information and constructs knowledge. It's the only instrument (panel), he has at disposal (Giordan 1978, Giordan et De Vecchi, 1987).

Learning depends on these prior thinking notions. It is also through them that the learner interprets information spread by the teacher or the media. If teaching does not consider this fact, if teaching does not work on the learners conceptions, the sitting notions hold their own and the conveyed knowledge is evaded, transformed or stay isolated from the familiar knowledge.

Now this hypothesis is largely corroborate. It appears that the learning of any piece of knowledge depends on the pupils conceptions, and if the teacher ignores them, "sitting" notions work as an obstacle (a sort of snag). This hypothesis has conducted our laboratory to produced a lot of researches in this field. Mainly we have categorized different conception on different subjects, we have explained the different obstacles.

We have also constructed different tools to define what is a conception and how it's work. In a first approximation, we can say that the conception is not only an image, a simple idea, a simple production of the reality. It is a thinking process, a answer to a question. The conception presents different levels of organisation.

But today we must go further. The knowledge of the pupils’ conceptions is useful, but not sufficient. The new research question is : how to use learner conception ? Learning includes a number of many, multifunctional and pluricontextulized activities. Learning mobilises several levels of mental organisation that, at first glance, seem disparate as well as a considerable number of regulation loops (feed-back). Trying to explain everything with one single theory is attempting the impossible.

Reference

Giordan, A., New models to learn ? In Prospect, Vol. 25(1995), no 1, p. 109-127.