The Problem of Epistemology in Education: The Debate Between Direct Instruction and Constructivist Approaches

Education and instructional methods often trigger debates among opposing positions regarding how the growth of knowledge operates in students. Some positions are content oriented while others are child centered. But each of these should not be an exclusive position.

We are, after all, teaching students who are psychological subjects however conceived. On the other hand, what we are teaching, the content to be taught, comes from the academic disciplines and must be respected as to its valid forms and the facts which it embodies. Regardless of the debates, then, any notion of education must eventually not only take account and explain both of these twin aspects but integrate them into an coherent explanation of how disciplinary knowledge arises in student thought such that it matches the valid forms of the adult understanding. To ignore one or the other reduces the problem to one or the other pseudo-necessity that arises out of a centration either on learning the valid form of the disciplinary knowledge, an external factor as the essential source of academic growth, or a centration that embraces necessity of the constructive involvement of students, an internal factor. In either case, the one seems to call for ignoring the other.

As such, these opposing positions raise the problem of the respective contributions of external factors—such as verbal and social factors, experiences with physical objects, direct teaching effects, textbook presentations, etc—and the subjective processes of the students in the formation of knowledge within students—their construction of misconceptions and misperceptions, their attempts to solve problems and formulate an expression of their understanding, their attempts to represent things either verbally or graphically, etc. and proper conceptions. Thus, the problem as defined in this way is one of epistemology since it involves more than the two disciplines of psychology and the curricular content.

The problem goes deeper to examine the sources of knowledge and whether the formation of knowledge is due to the external aspect or to an internal one and their relative contributions especially as the relation between the two as to their relative contributions might change with development. At one time, the child is instructed in how to perform a simple mathematical operation, and it then appears in his thinking as if a simple, learned effect. Later, the learned effect appears to be replaced by a logically valid logical-mathematical system of understanding that allows extension and generalization without new learning. The facts that were taught appear to be replaced by norms of reasoning.

Thus, this apparent change from the students’ growth by simple accommodations of learning of external information to the replacement of these simple accumulations by a valid system of understanding and reasoning that integrates and extends the thought of students strongly suggests there is more going on in the growth of knowledge than a simple additive process at work. There appears to be no simple accumulation of information since at every level there is an apparent re-organization and replacement of previous accommodations with more advanced systems of thought by the learner. Thus, neither the external nor the internal can account for the growth of knowledge. What at one time appears to be a simple act of learning at another level appears as a mental construction.

Furthermore, since the subject develops in the ability to learn, the processes by which the interaction between the student and external educational factors changes and develops in that it becomes richer and more complex. It does this enrichment not by simple addition but by transformations of both the students’ abilities to learn and the nature of the content that students see and believe they know. Since there is transformation of both the methods and the content of learning, it is no longer a matter of a simple linear progression or of the simple replacement of earlier forms of knowledge with later ones. And to investigate and understand that developmental process requires its own precise methods and theoretic models. That investigation, is of course, the essence of developmental epistemology.