Annotated Bibliography of Resources for Educational Reform, Coherent Teaching Practice, and Improved Student Learning

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• von Glaserfeld, E. (1993). Questions and answers about radical constructivism. In K. Tobin (Ed.), The practice of constructivism in science education (pp. 23-38). Washington: AAAS Press.

Ernst von Glaserfeld has been very influential in the development of the constructivist theory of knowing. He was asked questions about this theory at a meeting of National Association of Research in Science Teaching in 1990. Those questions and his responses are compiled in this book chapter. Radical constructivism, according to von Glaserfeld, refers to the movement that broke with the tradition of cognitive representationism and posits a different relationship between knowledge and the outside world. This conception is now generally assumed by the term "constructivism." Constructivism replaces the notion of correspondence between reality and our knowledge of it with the notion of viability. He considers the role of social interactions in learning and then discusses the implications of constructivism for instruction. 

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