Some thoughts on the notion of purposeful learning

What makes a student read a novel, solve a mathematical problem, perform a chemistry experiment, and study the customs of strange peoples from remote lands or the causes of an historical event? Interest might be an answer; the teacher or the parent might be another. Though students at all levels study mathematics, history, or science because they have an interest in them or because their parents and teachers say so, it is debatable whether they think that these activities are important for their life. Students may not have been invited to a discourse on the important questions of life. Educators and curriculum designers have made considerable efforts to include content and methods that address students' interests and needs, thus making learning more relevant to their lives. Yet making learning relevant to the lives of students, as Goodlad (1984) noted, is one of the most demanding challenges we face.

From a philosophical point of view, it would be much more challenging to try to justify why some activities in the curriculum are more relevant than others, but some "practical" questions remain pressing and legitimate: Why is it so difficult to motivate students to learn? Why have traditional approaches to curriculum not worked so far? And why, in the end, do we have to resort to an either-or dichotomy between an academic curriculum and a child-centered one? Our difficulty in answering these questions points directly to the consideration of the notion of purposeful learning.

LEARNING WITHOUT PURPOSE?

In the provocative Teachers without Goals, Students without Purpose, Perkinson (1993, 16) argued that learning does not require any special purpose, because all that is required by a student is a modification and refinement of "his or her existing knowledge when he or she recognizes its inadequecies." Inborn expectations, as Perkinson (1993) and Popper (1972) suggested, are responsible for the growth of knowledge; any contradiction of these expectations results in disorder, and the individual then attempts to restore order.

As Piaget (1977) noted, disequilibrium produces the driving force of cognitive development. This disequilibrium occurs when there are contradictions between an individual's expectations about an event or about the behavior of an object and the actual results of his or her actions. For example, a child might believe, and therefore expect, that an orange will fall faster than a peanut if left to fall to the ground, but a simple demonstration provides a firsthand contradiction, because the orange and the peanut reach the ground simultaneously. Over the last two decades, this idea of disequilibration has proved very fruitful, particularly in the area of science education, because it was a good strategy to challenge and treat students' misconceptions (Hendry and King 1994; Weaver 1998). Discrepant events provided the starting point of the instructional process. The general idea behind the use of these discrepant events is that the disturbance of a prior knowledge system and the "dissatisfaction with existing conceptions" (Posner, Strike, Hewson, and Gertzog 1982,214) leads to the construction of new knowledge. As von Glasersfeld (1989,128) noted, "The learning theory that emerges from Piaget's work can be summarized by saying that cognitive change and learning take place when a scheme, instead of producing the expected result, leads to perturbation, and perturbation, in turn, leads to accommodation that establishes a new equilibrium."

Though cognitive disequilibration can be a good motivator to gain students' attention and get them involved in the learning process, it is debatable whether this involvement is a personal engagement with ideas. The emphasis on existing conceptions, their elicitation, and their reorganization-which has risen along with the constructivist perspective (Driver and Oldham 1986; Posner et al. 1982; Weaver 1998)-cannot help with solving the motivational problem, because this approach is based upon a rationalistic view that "is embedded in a narrowly conceived notion of the role knowledge plays in an individual's life" (Cobern 1996, 579). This approach is of course in line with the well-- known idea that the most important factor influencing learning is what the learner already knows (Ausubel, Novak, and Hanesian 1978). Though this principle can provide guidelines concerning the events of instruction, it presupposes a personal engagement with curricular ideas which, unfortunately, is not always the case (Hadzigeorgiou 1999). Without an invitation to discuss the purpose of learning the various subjects of the curriculum, students will always feel that their life is more or less cut off from what they are supposed to learn.

The idea of self-regulation and autonomous reorganization (Perkinson 1993; Piaget 1977) does not imply that no purpose is involved in the learning process. Certainly, an intrinsic drive for understanding follows dissatisfaction with existing concepts-and this dissatisfaction is clearly a precondition of learning. However, it is one thing to make these statements and another thing to argue that human learning does not involve any purpose at all. If effective learning was based solely on reorganization of the existing conceptual structure, then constructivist theory would have solved our problems, particularly with science and mathematics learning. Unfortunately, it has not.