Conceptual Models in Educational Research and Practice.
Conceptual Models in Educational Research and Practice.
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教育研究和实践中的概念模型。
DOI:
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发表时间:
1991
期刊:
影响因子:
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通讯作者:
L. Steffe
中科院分区:
文献类型:
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作者:
Ernst von Glaserfeld;L. Steffe
ions that are involved in mathematics only if they are already carrying out the operations from which the new conceptual structures are to be derived. (We do not see how anyone could make abstractions from anything except his or her own experiences and actions.) The main purpose of the teaching experiment is, in fact, to discover the kinds of situations that may induce a naive learner first, to embark on a novel way of operating and then, if this new way led to success, to abstract from it an operative conceptual structure. Thorn's (1973) notion of extracting conscious structures from unconscious activity is for us closely linked to Piaget's notion of accommodation, a notion which, unfortunately, is not as simple as many Piaget interpreters seem to believe. Thus, we frequently read textbook definitions that are essentially similar to the following: "While assimilation involved changing incoming information, accommodation involved changing the structures used to assimilate information" (Brainerd, 1978, p. 24). To anyone who reads the Genevan literature in the original language, this would at once be suspect because Piaget does not use the term "information." But let us focus on accommodation. One of the most important aspects of a viable model of the learner would be an indication of at least some of the ways in which a learner's conceptual structures are superseded by structures that seem more adequate from the teacher's point of view. Such modification or increase in an individual's conceptual repertoire is indeed what Piaget called accommodation; yet, in his constructivist theory, change or growth does not take place in response to external information but in response to an internal perturbation. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.112 on Mon, 03 Oct 2016 05:05:07 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms The Journal of Educational Thought, Vol. 25, No. 2, August 1991 101 The sort of perturbations that lead to the accommodation of conceptual structures are perturbations that arise in the context of a scheme. A scheme is a triadic arrangement consisting of an initiating situation (which may be perceptual or conceptual), an activity or operation, and an expected outcome or result (von Glasersfeld, 1979). According to the original scheme theory, there are three main causes of perturbation: 1. A situation is recognized as instantiation of one that has been associated with a particular action, the action is carried out, and the expected result fails to be experienced. (Note that the recognition of the trigger situation is where assimilation plays its part.) This first kind of perturbation, that is, the failure to produce the expected result, will most frequently lead to an accommodation of the recognition procedure. 2. If the scheme, as described in (1), produces, instead of the accustomed result, another result that turns out to be desirable, this may lead to differentiation in the initial situation or in the activity and thus to the construction of a new scheme which will then be expected to produce the new result. 3. A different activity, associated with a different situation, leads to a result that is recognized as the expected result of another scheme. This, obviously, is an extremely general model of the learning situation and it should be clear that, in any area of experience that provides complex goals, the learner will soon become susceptible to other perturbations. Above all, with increasing familiarity and practice, the final component of the scheme, the expected outcome, tends to become a more diversified factor and its nonattainment will then lead to distinguishable subcategories of the perturbation listed under (1) above. The work of mapping and sorting out these ramifications is still very much in progress. This work has, of course, its own problems. One of them is that it does not conform to the traditional procedure of experimental psychology, in that its progress is necessarily ad hoc. Educational researchers, in their role as observers in a teaching experiment, may at a given point decide to generate a perturbation on the spontaneous conjecture that the child in the experiment might be able to make a certain accommodation. Similarly, they may conjecture that the child made an accommodation. But there is no way to tell whether or not this is actually the case. The only way to confirm such conjectures is to engage the child in further interactions. However, what form these interactions should take with a particular child at a particular point in that child's conceptual development is not something that can be decided beforehand in any detail. It must depend on the experimenter's experienced intuition at the particular