William Cope
Eric Thomas
Torsten Galle
Kathryn AshbyLearning, Knowledge and Human Development MOOC’s Updates
Contructivism
The most effective research I have read about contructivism is Piagets experiments with children. He shows that there are set stages of development, and no matter your culture, the stages are stay the same. These stages are very important to know when you are teaching a certain age, you need to know what stage they are at so you can be most effective. You can also determine is a child is behind, that way you can create the steps needed to catch them up with there peers. The limits are, can one child progress faster than the other, this question was never answered and surely there has to be a child who is "beyond his age".
While Piaget's theorization has been one of the most respected and influential works in psychology till date, it cannot be dismissed that perhaps the very problem with the theory is its strictly categorized stages. Bower (1982) and Harris (1983) demonstrates through experiments that the concept of 'object-permanence' develops in a child earlier than Piaget's given stages of cognitive development. Similarly, 'egocentricism' in children is believed to develop much before entering 'pre-operational' stages. More often than not, a child shows a mixture of stages. Moreover, Piaget's theory does not qualitatively differentiate between two children of different ages.