Learning Experience: the Constructivist Theory Lens Report

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Personal Preferences in Learning

Being a part and parcel of people’s everyday experience, learning often occurs on a subconscious level; as a result, tracking down the learning process becomes increasingly difficult as one gets older. The process of metacognition, which is often defined as “a complex, multi-dimensional concept, involving four main aspects: self reflection, understanding the mind of the other, decentration and mastery” (Donkersgoed et al. 32), allows one to take a closer look at one’s learning process. Personally, I learn by paying attention to the visual elements that are introduced to me in the course of the lesson or specific learning activity.

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Unfortunately, I do not perceive aural information just as good, which makes the parts of learning involving listening quite complicated. Moreover, my learning process involves careful structuring of data and defining relations between the key elements mentioned during the lesson. Particularly, I need to understand something well prior to remembering the patterns required to follow, even if all that is needed is to learn the essential data by heart. While admittedly solid, the specified learning pattern often turns out to be quite time-consuming.

Learning Experience: Description

To be completely honest, I used to feel very uncomfortable about learning information that did not require the use of logic whatsoever. Particularly, history lessons used to be very tedious to me, as I could hardly relate to something that happened in the distant past. However, there came a day when history lessons changed for me once and for all.

I was not looking forward to what seemed an excruciating history project when the teacher suggested approaching the study process in a slightly different manner. She brought several posters depicting the key people, who were the key figures in the era in question. These posters depicted not merely the people and objects that the teacher was talking about, but also the emotions that these people were experiencing. Some of them looked puzzled, others had a very determined expression on their faces; as a result, it was very easy to relate to the people mentioned in the book and understand what they were going through. I looked closely at these pictures, trying to guess how these people came to be what they were for their states and their era and realized that history as a subject, in fact, was much more than boring lectures.

As time passed, I learned to locate new and exciting details in my books on history, which made me reconsider even my attitude towards lectures on the subject. Particularly, I realized with a bit of surprise that I managed to remember increasingly more facts during lectures due to the skill of identifying essential data. The above-mentioned skill, in its turn, was developed in the course of reading the books assigned for studying topics covered in class in an in-depth manner.

Actions Undertaken: Analysis

Although the process of learning described above seemed very simple and quite basic to me at first, in a retrospect, I realize that there was much more to it than I suspected. Particularly, the engagement of two types of data into the learning process, i.e., images and texts, helped me relate to the material in a much more efficient manner than any other approach. As I have stressed above, the need to incorporate listening skills into the process of studying instead of using my abilities to think logically always prevented me from studying history efficiently. The actions that I undertook, in their turn, helped me view the learning process from an entirely different perspective.

The discovery that I made was, in fact, rather breathtaking for a thirteen-year-old student; I was filled with excitement, and the only thing that kept me away from shouting something silly in triumph was being in a small room surrounded by fifteen other students and a rather stern teacher. The information provided by the teacher was the key data for the on-coming exam, so I was truly happy to discover my way of learning.

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Theory Learned: Constructivism

The change that I underwent at the specified moment in my life can be viewed from the perspective of Constructivism. Typically identified as “a way of re-describing the world” (Soltani and Yusoff 13), Constructivism allows for viewing a certain phenomenon (learning in this case) as a series of actions structured in a specific manner (Silva and Hill 90). Therefore, it can be assumed that Constructivism by definition presupposes that the process of metacognition should be involved in the learning process (Jézégou 11). Since, by engaging in metacognition and identifying the key stages of their learning process, people structure their ideas about a specific phenomenon, concept, or theory, they use the essential principles of Constructivism in the process.

A closer look at the principles of Constructivism will reveal that the specified process presupposes active use of personal experiences and provision of a significant amount of learner’s independence in the course of studying (Joyner et al. 437).

The above-mentioned characteristics of a Constructivist approach are quite applicable to the scenario described above; despite not being entirely self-guided (Larmar and Lodge 94), the process of change launched in me as a learner was enhanced by the willingness to view history as something more than merely a set of names and dates. Practically, I deconstructed the very process of retrieving aural and visual information and understood the way, in which I perceived and related to each. Indeed, as it has been emphasized above, though the teacher provided the materials, the key discovery was made by me; it is most likely that the teacher did not intend to get feedback of this magnitude.

The Person Scaffolding: Impact

In a retrospect, I believe that it was the teacher’s intent to draw our attention to the fact that the events described in history books affected us on a variety of levels, as well as to make us relate to the people, whom we had to learn about. The impact of the scaffolding process cannot possibly be underrated, as the teacher did everything to make what could have been a boring lecture a fun time-traveling adventure. As a result, the actions that the teacher took affected me immensely.

Particularly, the fact that the teacher incorporated the study of images into the learning process deserves to be mentioned. Moreover, the questions that seemed pointless at the time, such as what the person in the picture might be like to pass a certain law or to fight for freedom, also shaped our identity as learners. Personally, I finally realized what the entire purpose of studying history was and learned that history helps us analyze the experienced acquired in the process of development One of the most memorable lessons, this lecture in history will always stay with me as a perfect example of a lesson designed the right way.

Works Cited

Donkersgoed, Rozanne J. M. Van, Steven De Jong, Mark Van der Gaag, André Aleman, Paul H Lysaker, Lex Wunderink and George. H. M. Pijnenborg. “A Manual-Based Individual Therapy to Improve Metacognition In Schizophrenia: Protocol of a Multi-Center RCT. BMC Psychiatry 14.1 (2014): 27-34. Print.

Jézégou, Annie. “Towards a Distance Learning Environment That Supports Learner Self-Direction: The Model of Presence.” International Journal of Self-Directed Learning 9.1, (2012): 11–23. Print.

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Joyner, Sheila A., Matthew B. Fuller, Peggy C. Holzweiss, Susan Henderson, and Robert Young. “The Importance of Student-Instructor Connections in Graduate Level Online Courses.” MERLOT Journal of Online Learning and Teaching 10.3 (2014): 436–445. Print.

Larmar, Stephen, and Jason Lodge. “Making Sense of How I Learn: Metacognitive Capital and the First Year University Student.” The International Journal of the First Year in Higher Education 5.1 (2014): 93–105. Print.

Silva, Chamellé René de and Margaret A. Hill. “Higher Order Reading Skills and Reader Response Theory: Strategies for the Classroom.” International Journal for Innovation Education and Research 1.2 (2013): 87–108. Print.

Soltani, Fakhreddin and Mohammad Agus Yusoff. “Concept of Security in the Theoretical Approaches.” Research Journal of International Studies, 24.1 (2012): 7–17. Print.

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