Constructivism is defined by Ormrod as a mental process in which a learner takes many separate pieces of information and uses them to build an overall understanding or interpretation. After putting much thought into this learning theory and writing my paper about it, I have re-realized with greater emphasis how important this "building" of knowledge is in one's learning. Students don't simply walk into a class and leave their past experiences at the door. Everyone comes from a unique and specific set of experiences in their stories that highly affect the way he or she perceives an idea or field of study.
One of the activities we did in class the other day, where we looked at a an image of a bustling city street (perhaps NY city) for 30 seconds and then had to recreate the visual in a drawing from memory. This was very challenging even for an artist like me, to fully remember where each building met the sidewalk, which direction the cars were heading, the signage on the bus and billboards etc. The exercise really helped me understand the idea of construction in retrieval and how our brains build off of prior knowledge when approaching new information. For example, while I was drawing that city scene I included a crosswalk, because I figured there should be one in the picture. When in the actual image, there was no visible crosswalk. The fact that there were pedestrians crossing the street triggered some pre-existing understanding of a city environment that resulted in my thinking there was a crosswalk there. Keeping these ideas in my mind will be a helpful tool in measuring the learning of my students. I must consider equally the current environment, behavior, and prior experiences and backgrounds of my students in order to teach them in the most appropriate and efficient way.
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