Curriculum Books Have Been Written Since the

¶ … curriculum books have been written since the turn of the [20th] century; each with a different version of what 'curriculum' means (Ackerman, 1988). I define classroom curriculum design as the sequencing and pacing of content along with the experiences students have with that content. My use of the qualifier classroom is important. By definition, I am considering those decisions regarding sequencing, pacing, and experiences that are the purview of the classroom teacher.

Some aspects of curricular design are addressed at the school level if, in fact, a school has a guaranteed and viable curriculum. Regardless of the direction provided by the school (or district), individual teachers still need to make decisions regarding curricular design at the classroom level given the unique characteristics of their students. Indeed, in a meta-analysis involving 22 studies, Anderson, (2003) found a strong relationship between a student's knowledge and experience with content and the type of sequencing and pacing necessary to learn that content (Jonassen, 2009).

Unfortunately teachers frequently do not make the decisions about how to sequence and pace content within their lessons and units. Rather, they rely on the design of textbooks for guidance. Roger Farr and his colleagues note that this is common at both the elementary and secondary levels (Dewey, 2008). One of the major findings from the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) was that teachers in the United States exhibit an overreliance on textbooks for decisions about content and pacing (Jonassen, 2009).

If textbooks were organized in ways consistent with known principles of learning, this wouldn't be so bad. Unfortunately, this does not seem to be the case (Dewey, 2012). For example, science textbooks have been described as well illustrated dictionaries as opposed to effective vehicles for student learning (Dewey, 2008). It is clear that classroom teachers must make decisions about sequencing and presentation of content.

What are the principles that should guide those decisions? To begin answering this question, let's consider two current movements in education that can, if implemented incorrectly, work against effective classroom curriculum design. These movements are loosely referred to as "constructivism" and "brain-based education" (Willingham, et al. 2009). Multiple books and reports published within the last decade sought to apply the theory of constructivism and the research on the brain to K-12 education (Dewey, 2008). My comments should not be interpreted as a criticism of researchers' intent or scholarship.

In some cases, however, K-12 educators have misapplied their suggestions or, more seriously, discarded proven practices in the name of constructivism or brain-based education. Although these two fields offer great insight into the dynamics of teaching and learning, they should be used with caution and not overly applied in lieu of time-honored and well-researched practices. These cautions are detailed in the writings of both John Bruer (Dewey, 2006) and John Anderson and his colleagues (Dewey, 2006). I draw from their work heavily in this discussion.

According to Anderson and his colleagues (2003), the constructivist vision of learning is captured nicely by the following quotation from Paul Cobb and his colleagues (Dewey, 2006) regarding the subject of mathematics: … learning would be viewed as an active, constructive process in which students attempt to resolve problems that arise as they participate in the mathematical practices of the classroom. Such a view emphasizes that the learning-teaching process is interactive in nature and involves the implicit and explicit negotiation of mathematical meanings.

In the course of these negotiations, the teacher and students elaborate the taken-as-shared mathematical reality that constitutes the basis for their ongoing communication. (Dewey, 2012) Cobb and colleagues (Jonassen, 2009) exemplify this position by describing an effort to teach 2nd graders to count by tens. Instead of teaching students the principle, the teacher provides objects bundled in groups of ten. Invariably students discover that counting by tens is more efficient than counting by ones. Of course, there are many laudable aspects of this example.

Labeling and describing curriculum ideologies does little more than provide a glimpse at a possible explanation for behavior, since people and philosophies are much too complex to be summed up clearly in a few words, and generalizations generally omit someone (Miller, 2011). Anderson, (2003) notes "One can readily agree with one part of the constructivist claim: that learning must be an active process (p. 11)." Anderson and colleagues warn that this principle is frequently over generalized to mean that teachers should rarely (if ever) teach content to students (Turban & Aronson, 2008).

The same concern about overgeneralization has been articulated on brain research. Flavell, (2009) asserts that the brain research is not yet conclusive enough to provide specific guidance for K-12 educators: However, we should be wary of claims that neuroscience has much to tell us about education, particularly if those claims derive from the neuroscience and education argument. The neuroscience and education argument attempts to link learning, particularly early childhood learning, with what neuroscience has discovered about neural development and synaptic change.

Neuroscience has discovered a great deal about neurons and synapses but not nearly enough to guide educational practice. Currently, the span between brain and learning cannot support much of a load. Too many people marching in step across it could be dangerous (Anderson & Fincham, 2004). The confusion created by well-intended applications (and, in some cases, misapplications) of constructivism and brain research are substantive enough to make the suggestions in this paper difficult to defend.

It is helpful to identify some basic principles about the nature of learning and the nature of content (and their interactions), and to compare and contrast these principles with educational applications of constructivism and brain research. These principles are derived primarily from the world of cognitive psychology (Anderson & Fincham, 2004) the most fertile soil for educational reform at the present time.

As Bruer explains, when the brain research does reach the point at which it can guide educational practice, it will use the well-established principles of cognitive psychology (Sun & Peterson, 2007): There is a well-established bridge, now nearly 50 years old, between education and cognitive psychology. There is a second bridge, only around 10 years old, between cognitive psychology and neuroscience. This newer bridge is allowing us to see how mental functions map onto brain structures.

When neuroscience does begin to provide useful insights about instruction and educational practice, those insights will be the result of extensive traffic over this second bridge. Cognitive psychology provides the only firm ground we have to anchor these bridges. It is the only way to go if we eventually want to move between education and the brain (Anderson & Fincham, 2004). Three principles from cognitive psychology form the basis for my recommended action steps to implement effective classroom curriculum design.

One of the common themes in constructivist and brain-based models of instruction is that the content to be learned is a flexible and sometimes negotiated commodity. Such sentiments are commonly expressed as "student autonomy" (Collins, et al. 1989), "alternate curriculums" (Jonassen, 2010), or "invitational learning" (Barrell, 2001). These are useful ideas, but can be detrimental to effective instruction if interpreted to mean that teachers should not have clear learning goals, communicate these goals to students, and design instruction around them.

Even when a teacher has clear learning goals, students might not obtain the targeted knowledge and skill. Graham Nuthall dramatically illustrated this rather disturbing phenomenon (Clark & Mayer, 2003). He traced the experiences of elementary students in integrated science and social studies units on the topic of Antarctica. In general, all students were involved in the same basic learning experiences. However, after three weeks, the content recalled and understood was quite different from student to student. The same was true after one year.

For example, where some students had detailed and accurate recollections of a specific incident that occurred on Mt. Erebus in Antarctica, other students had incorrect recollections or none at all. Reasons included differences in levels of engagement, differences in the number of tasks completed, and differences in the types of optional activities students selected. A direct implication of Nuthall's work is that teachers must identify specific aspects of content to be addressed and plan the learning experiences accordingly.

This is not quite as simple as it sounds because most content has many potential elements that might be the focus of instruction. For example, possible focuses for instruction in fractions include (Nonaka, 2001) the relationship between fractions and whole numbers, the relationship between fractions and decimals, the relationship between fractions and percents, the process of converting fractions to decimals, and • the different categories or types of fractions. The complex nature of seemingly straightforward instructional topics is well recognized in the research and theoretical literature (Anderson, 2003).

Some of the more salient aspects of an instructional topic that might be the focus of instruction are listed in Figure 11.1 (pp. 110 -- 111). Principle 2. Learning requires engagement in tasks that are structured or are sufficiently similar to allow for effective transfer of knowledge (Anderson & Fincham, 2004). Virtually all discussions of constructivism or brain-based education emphasize the need for students to generate their own unique meaning regarding the content being learned.

However, some of the discussions of constructivism and brain-based approaches do not recognize the need for teachers to structure classroom tasks to facilitate the construction of meaning. SIGs integrate the best aspects of traditional role-plays and simulations into a learning environment that promotes active engagement, interactivity and collaboration, the application of knowledge and skills, and the use of complex thinking skills, including empathy and values-based learning (Nonaka, 2001). The constructivist view of learning, in various guises, is widely embraced by most researchers studying cognition in education.

Although, the meaning of constructivism is currently the subject of considerable debate (Clark & Mayer, 2003), the essential idea is that knowledge is actively built by the learner through transformations to existing knowledge structures, rather than being directly transmitted from the instructor to the learner. The implication is that a student's prior knowledge is critically important in shaping the acquisition of new knowledge. Studies of many different domains in science indicate that students begin their study of science with strongly held misconceptions of phenomena (Jonassen, 2010).

Several researchers expressed the view that these misconceptions are embedded in robust domain-specific theories (Anderson, 2009). This has led some researchers to suggest a radical reform of science instruction built around a conceptual change epistemology involving the replacement of students' naive conceptions with more robust scientific ones (Flavell, 2009). Gagne, et al. (2003) argued that students do not exhibit theoretical coherence beyond a very limited context. He proposed that these theories are a fragmented, loosely connected, collection of ideas, having none of the commitment or systematicity attributable to scientific theories.

Knowledge is believed to be distributed in pieces in both initial and advanced states of understanding. The development of expertise is not a function of a shift from intuitive everyday concepts but from the beginner's flat and fragmentary knowledge to the expert's systematic multilayered knowledge structures. Jonassen, (2010) suggested that replacement and confronting students' beliefs do not constitute an adequate approach to learning. He argued that students' intuitive knowledge is rooted in productive and useful knowledge, which provides a basis for developing a more expert-like understanding (Sun & Peterson, 2008).

Students' beliefs systems lack the coherence of scientists and misconceptions are embedded in complex knowledge systems. These patterns of misunderstanding are not the result of a single piece of wrong knowledge. Rather they reflect reciprocating networks of knowledge elements, which can be correct, partially correct, or flawed (Flavell, 2009). Therefore, to understand misconceptions, it is necessary to uncover the multiple contributing sources of knowledge that comprise them. However, students in advanced knowledge domains, such as medicine, have acquired substantial formal knowledge and their beliefs can exhibit substantial theoretical coherence (Nonaka, 2001).

As discussed later in this chapter, people's indigenous cultural belief systems can exhibit varying amounts of coherence (Anderson, 2009). Detailed study of knowledge structures sometimes reveal, however, that systematicity of beliefs may be more illusory than real. Further probing of subjects may indicate that their belief systems exhibit internal contradictions and sometime provide explanations that show inconsistencies across problems. Most medical students have extensive backgrounds in the biological sciences and some knowledge of the physical sciences.

Much of the basic science curricula in medical schools is predicated on the fact that these students have an adequate background so that instructors can focus on more advanced topics. There is a growing body of evidence to suggest that medical students exhibit significant misconceptions (Clark & Mayer, 2003). This is consistent with other research in the biological sciences. Songer and Jonassen, (2010) documented conceptual difficulties in college students in understanding cellular respiration, not only persist after advanced levels of instruction, but also increase in number.

There is compelling evidence to suggest that teleological causation may underlie intuitive theories of biology in children as well as adults (Anderson & Fincham, 2004). Teleology explains causes in terms of a purpose or goal. For example, an organism's purpose is to survive and reproduce. Biological processes can be thought about in terms of their mechanism of action or in teleological terms.

Although it is advantageous for students to have a principled mechanistic understanding of scientific concepts, teleological or goal-oriented explanations are often presented in textbooks and in lectures to orient students to the functions of a particular bodily mechanism. Teleological explanations are common in young children (Collins, et al. 1989), but are also evident in medical students (Collins, et al. 1989). It is hypothesed that teleological explanations may contribute to patterns of understanding and misunderstanding in medical students (Nonaka, 2001).

Constructivism is a postmodern antiscience philosophy that is based on Piaget's work on how children construct concepts and conceptual relations and on the philosophy of two early eighteenth-century opponents of the Scientific Revolution, Giambattista Vico and George Berkeley (Collins, et al. 1989). It's a form of subjective empiricism that puts its emphasis on the thoughts of the knower and views the search for truth as an illusion. "Knowledge can never be considered true in the conventional sense (e.g.

correspond to an observer-independent reality) because it is made by a knower who does not have access to such a reality. From [the constructivist's] perspective, Truths are replaced by viable models -- and viability is always relative to a chosen goal" (Sun & Peterson, 2007). Constructivism redefines knowledge to be whatever individuals, "given the range of present experience within their tradition of thought and language, consider viable" (Anderson, 2009).

Such an ideology would be of no interest to scientists and science educators were it not, in effect, the official ideology of the reform movement in the United States and elsewhere. New Zealand is so committed to nonobjectivity in science teaching that the lecture-demonstration tables have been removed from all the science classrooms in the country (Nickols, 2009).This is to prevent teachers from claiming to know more than their students, thus unduly influencing how the students' construct their own knowledge.

Constructivism is deeply embedded in many educational institutions in the United States, is supported by the National Science Foundation, and was for a time the official ideology of the science-education reform effort in Massachusetts (Clark & Mayer, 2003). But when push comes to shove, no one knows how students are to construct their own theories of atoms and electrons, of stars and galaxies, of DNA and genetics.

Educators are beginning to recognize the limitations of constructivist ideology as they begin to address the problem of implementing state and national content standards (Sun & Peterson, 2007). This openly antiscientific ideology is still fashionable, however, because it's in step with the many postmodern doctrines that are endemic in academia today (Flavell, 2009).

Constructivism fully supports the view that establishment science is the particular construction of white males because it can argue that what is viable for white males at some historical period may not be viable for other human beings at some other time. But more important, by devaluing scientific knowledge -- bringing it down, so it speak, to the level of everyday knowledge -- constructivist educators with no knowledge of science have increased their own power in science education relative to educators with scientific knowledge (Sun & Peterson, 2008).

In the United States, pre-high- school science education, such as it is, is controlled by professional science educators, trained in schools of education which have been notorious for a hundred years for their low academic standards. Rare is the science educator who knows even the science expected of an eighth grader. It's this group which has enthusiastically endorsed constructivism because it allows them to speak only about process (whatever that is) rather than content (of which they are ignorant).

And it's this group that writes the frameworks, standards, and textbooks for elementary and middle schools. This harsh judgment is borne out by the incredible number of errors, misconceptions, and undefined terms that occur in the most recent spate of middle school textbooks. Gagne, et al. (2003) has published two pages of errors that he found in SCIENCE Interactions (Nickols, 2009), commenting that with eleven authors and countless consultants and reviewers they should have done better.

In addition to Iona's list, I have a list of my own, including the erroneous implication that buoyancy depends on how far a totally submerged object is below the surface of the water (Sun & Peterson, 2007). Constructivist Education Constructivists believe that each child can learn the scientific process in a rather straightforward manner by observing patterns and making predictions (Anderson, 2009). This may sound reasonable, but it's essentially Aristotelian science and is contrary to everything we have learned about science since the Scientific Revolution.

I had an opportunity to observe this in June, 1995, when a constructivist was invited to facilitate some inquiry-based lessons on density and buoyancy to twenty-four middle-school science teachers who were participating in a two-week SEED (Science Education through Experiments and Education) program (Anderson & Fincham, 2004). He began by giving the teachers a number of equal-volume cylinders of different materials and asking them to determine which sank and which floated.

He then had them weigh the cylinders and an equal volume of water, and they found that the sinkers were all heavier than the water and the floaters were all lighter. The obvious conclusion is that heavy objects sink and light objects float. But it's the density, not the weight, that determines whether an object sinks or floats. It's impossible to arrive at this elusive conclusion by investigations of this nature (Nickols, 2009). The word "density" drifted into the discussion and the formula d = m/V.