The Issues of Moderate and Radical Constructivism in Education Theory

Abstract

This paper analyses and compares the characteristics of objectivist and non-objectivist theories of learning, and it is the first time in Hungarian to explicitly summarise the different features of the learning theories of moderate and radical constructivism. The objective of the theoretical synthesis was twofold: on the one hand, to map the literature on moderate constructivism, to define the theoretical framework of the concept, and to summarise its features in educational theory, and on the other hand, to provide theoretical justification for the hypothesis that moderate constructivism shares principles with radical constructivism in educational theory, but is closer to objectivist approaches to learning in epistemology. The theoretical literature on moderated constructivism shows a very diverse picture, as the concept can be found in legal (Jackson and Storey, 2015) and political science texts (Cederman and Daase, 2006; Grainca, 2008; Torun, 2016) as well as in social science texts (Roth et al., 2023). In educational studies, it is most often mentioned in the context of e-learning (Kelz, 2009; Alonso et al., 2011) and instructional design (Merril, 1991), and is used in theoretical studies as well as in the study of pedagogical practice (Beerenwinkel and von Arx, 2017; Dulamă and Ilovan, 2008; Keller et al., 2019; Leuchter et al., 2020; Uzuntiryaki et al., 2009). The theoretical works and empirical research analysed in this paper, and the summary table at the end of the last chapter, demonstrate that moderate constructivism clearly has more in common with objectivist learning theories than with radical constructivism.