as opposed to traditional didactic approaches to education, which seem to
be based on an assumption of direct transfer of knowledge from teacher to
student, without an intervening constructive process. The relationship between the ideas of constructivism and of agency in the
learning process can vary greatly. At one extreme, in behaviorally oriented
social psychology, there is an idea of student as agent without any
accompanying notion of student as constructor of knowledge (e.g.,
Mahoney &
Thoresen, 1974). Here the idea of agency is primarily that of
students' responsibility for their own success or failure in school. At the
other extreme is the idea, often linked to Piaget, of the child as natural-born
scientist, building a knowledge of the world through acting on it and trying
to make sense of the results (e.g., Isaacs, 1930). In between is the
Vygotskian notion of child and adult engaged in joint activities in a zone of
proximal development, with the child functioning as an agent insofar as the
activities are concerned but with knowledge being an emergent of the social
interaction between the child and a more knowledgeable other (e.g.,
Newman,
Griffin, &
Cole, 1989). These conceptions relate to quite different
teaching models. Our joint educational efforts over the past 15 years have been concerned
with giving children more active roles in school learning. In general, we
have adopted the prevailing constructivist view but with a special concern
for the kinds of competence that are needed if children are to function
successfully as agents in their own education. As a result, we have not been
wholly satisfied with any of the three views just described -- the behavioral
view and the views typically linked to Piaget and to Vygotsky. (Note that
our concern is with contemporary educational approaches, not with the
theories of Piaget and Vygotsky per se or with how validly contemporary
approaches reflect those theories.) In this article we focus on one particular
aspect of knowledge construction that will bring what we see as funda
mental educational problems into focus. This is the construction of
questions to guide inquiry. The immediate focus of our work is development of a computer
environment called CSILE. The system is described more fully later. Briefly, CSILE is a networked system that gives students simultaneous
access to a database that is composed of text and graphical notes that the
students produce themselves and a means of searching and commenting on
one another's contributions. The educational approach represented in
CSILE is perhaps better understood by relating it to more general models of
teaching. Elsewhere we ( Bereiter &
Scardamalia, 1987a) described three
idealized models of teaching. The Teacher A model is a task model. The
emphasis is on doing work, with learning assumed as ...
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