Assessment of the constructivist physics learning environments

Professionals are exposed to demanding requirements in society today. Increasing internationalization, the growing proportion of knowledge-intensive work, the rising usage of information technology, and a new organization of work based on networks and teams have extended the range of abilities needed in a professional workforce. What new world expects of individuals is not only a good command of relevant knowledge, but diversified social, communication and cooperation skills, ability to work in different contexts with experts from other fields, and ability to critically select, acquire, reproduce, and use knowledge. Since today's society and working life are rapidly changing, individuals must continuously construct and reconstruct their expertise in a process of lifelong learning. Therefore, these requirements pose considerable challenges to educational systems that are expected to produce experts for the world of the future (Tynjala, 1999).

Until the last few decades, research involving science students’ outcomes focused primarily on educational objectives in behavioral theory, but in more recent times, attention has been given to process of the cognitive and affective domain. In this context, constructivism and similar cognitive theories also represent a paradigm shift from behavioral to cognitive theory. Constructivism is to premise new cognitive meanings to describe learning. For example, constructivist conceptions of learning assume that knowledge is individually constructed and socially co-constructed by learners based on their interactions in an environment. The meaning that learners construct depends on their needs, beliefs and prior knowledge. Piaget (1973), one of the eminent leaders in the fields of learning theory and cognition, asserted that, "The basic principle of active methods will have to draw its inspiration from the history of science and may be expressed as follows: to understand is to discover, or reconstruct by rediscovery, and such conditions must be complied with if in the future individuals are to be formed who are capable of production and creativity and not simply repetition." (p.20) In that respect, constructivism is an epistemology that views knowledge as being “constructed” (or generated) within learners’ minds as they draw on their existing knowledge to make sense of perplexing new experiences (Akdeniz & Keser, 2002). From the constructivist perspective, learners attempt to make good sense of their new learning experiences by constructing their ideas or understandings from, and in relation to, their existing network of concepts. This process of conceptual assimilation involves incremental knowledge growth and only a small degree of perplexity for the alert and motivated learner with appropriate background knowledge. Therefore, one of the challenges facing a good teacher is to provide learning experiences that enable students to critically appraise the quality of their background knowledge (Churach & Fisher, 2001). Without this foundation, the connection with and between new ideas and understandings is likely to remain tenuous or shallow. In this process, learning environments have the most important role for the learner facing their experiences (Akdeniz & Keser, 2002).

An environment in which students are given an opportunity to explore and generous access to information resources – books, CD’s, print and video materials, etc., and tools – word-processing programs, e-mail, search tools, etc. – are likely to learn something if they are also given proper support or guidance. Under this conception, learning is fostered and supported, but not controlled or dictated in any strict fashion. For this reason, it is desirable to hear less about instructional environments and more about learning environments. Thus, a learning environment can be defined is a place where learning is fostered and supported. Wilson emphasized (1996) learning environments, as opposed to instructional environments, in order to promote “a more flexible idea of learning,” and he also stressed “meaningful, authentic, intentional, complex, cooperative and reflective learning activities that help the learner to construct and develop skills relevant to problem solving.” These characteristics have been seen among the goals of constructivist learning environments. According the Wilson (1996), one definition of constructivist learning environments is "a place where learners may work together and support each other as they use a variety of tools and information resources in their guided pursuit of learning goals and problem-solving activities." (p5)

Perkins (1991) distinguishes between constructivist and traditional learning environments. Constructivist learning environments contain more construction kits, phenomena and place more control of environment in hands of learners themselves. In such places, students are typically engaged in multiple activities in pursuit of multiple learning goals, with the teacher serving the role of coach and facilitator; whereas traditional classrooms would be a lean learning environment with relatively few tools for manipulating and observing content, making exploration and problem solving. Perkins also emphasizes differences in the amount of guidance or direct instruction found in learning environments, and he notes that poorly designed learning environments are vulnerable to failure due to the lack of support, leaving students with unreasonable performance expectations.

Learning environments in science have been studied extensively in last 30 years in order to determine their relationship to instructional strategies and social interaction between participants. These studies have shown that learning environments are closely related and sensitive to instructional methods. From this point of view, how we learn has been viewed as more important than what we actually do learn. Therefore, measures of learning environments can be used in order to improve instructional models and pedagogy in certain scientific subjects taught in schools (Hofstein, Nahum & Shore, 2001). All of these measures are a call for varying the instructional techniques that are used in the science classroom that will improve the learning environment. The most important mission for researchers, teachers and any decision-makers should be monitoring and assessing running processes in selected instructional models and designed learning environments according to related theories. This process should not only involve achievement tests, attitude scales, interviews and observations, but also include multiple research approaches, which should be composed of qualitative and quantitative data collection techniques and analyzing interrelated findings for any confirmation and comparison (Aldridge, Fraser & Huang, 1999; Akdeniz & Keser, 2002, Chang & Fisher, 2003). Hence, multiple research instruments have been designed for reliability and validity, which are very vital to secure an in-depth understanding of the learning environment and to provide richness to whole. In the last years, most learning environment research has involved students in several countries. Fraser (2002) gives the examples of these instruments as The Cultural Learning Environment Questionnaire–CLEQ (Waldrip & Fisher, 2000), the Constructivist Learning Environment Survey–CLES (Aldridge, Fraser & Taylor, 2000) and What Is Happening In This Class–WIHIC (Aldridge et al., 1999) . Although these instruments have been used and validated, many of the questionnaires overlap in what they measure; some contain items that might not be pertinent in current classroom settings. Furthermore, none of the instruments referred were specifically designed to assess any instructional model.

Constructivist theory has been implemented with several instructional models in education recently. The most commonly used model, with a convenient format to view constructivism, has been defined by 5E model (Smerdan & Burkam, 1999). In this model, the process is explained by employing five "E"s. They are: enter/engage, explore, explain, elaborate and evaluate.

The 5E Model is explained as follows. Engagement/enter is where teacher engages students in a new concept using short activities or problematic questions, thus, students’ pre-existing knowledge is activated. Exploration is where student generate new ideas not only carried out during activities such as lab activities, group discussion, hands-on activities, but also conducted as a preliminary investigation by means of the problems created in their minds during the engagement stage or their own pre-existing knowledge. Explanation is the most important phase in 5E model. Sahin et al. (2009) stated that the explanation phase is the most teacher-centered phase in 5E model. And teachers directly introduce a concept, a process or a skill so that (s)he confirms/disconfirms students’ experienced knowledge claims (Sahin et al. 2009). This definition may only be appropriate to traditional teaching approaches and is not acceptable for application to the constructivist theory. In contrast, student in this phase explain their solutions with evidence about their research problems that are determined in the engagement phase (Keser, 2003). Explanation gives students the opportunity to explain their findings to others. Students must first give their explanations while the teacher subsequently introduces relevant scientific explanations. These explanations need to be clearly linked to the engagement and exploration activities as well as student explanations (Keser, 2003; Boddy et al. 2003; Turk & Calik, 2008). In elaboration phase, students try to expand their newly acquired knowledge to a deeper and broader understanding and to extend their conceptual understanding and skills. Thus, children apply their new understandings to different contexts in a problem solving environment. Evaluation is where the teacher can track student’s progression in terms of students’ scientific process skills and goal oriented studies during the previous four phases (Keser, 2003)

The 5E model provides a tangible reference for teachers to scaffold their developing expertise in structuring a learning environment that will facilitate students’ interaction with a learning context in a critical, reflective and analytical way (Boddy et al. 2003). The five E's is an aid or organizer for the teacher to structure and sequence potential learning experiences in a systematic and synergistic way consistent with a constructivist view of teaching and learning. In itself, the five E's are not an essential part of student learning. The five e'sis a model, scaffold or framework for the teacher. For these reason, students must be provided with a learning environment that encourages them to explain their ideas and understandings and gives opportunity them to extend their knowledge of concepts to other contexts (Boddy et al. 2003).

The main goal of this study is to develop, implement and assess the survey of a constructivist learning environment designed according to 5E model. This was implemented in the context of high school physics classes in Turkey. Thus, the constructivist 5E model is central in our attempt to construct a learning environment. More specifically, the objectives of this study are:

i.	to create a constructivist learning environment according to the 5E model;
ii.	to develop a method for the professional development of physics teachers who plan to implement similar learning models and theories;
iii.	to present some recommendation to assess students' perceptions regarding their constructivist learning environments; and
iv.	to design methods determining (qualitatively and quantitatively) whether the incorporation of 5E model into the physics course reduced the differences between the actual and preferred students' perceptions of the constructivist learning environment.