This document discusses pedagogical constructivism and its implementation in science classrooms. It provides evidence from neuroscience to support constructivist teaching methods. Specifically, it discusses how: 1) Prior knowledge is organized in the brain in cognitive schemas and new information is learned more quickly when it can be assimilated into these existing schemas. 2) Implementing techniques like peer instruction and the 5E learning cycle model in classrooms allows students to learn from each other and receive personalized instruction, helping to draw out and correct any misconceptions. 3) Introducing difficult topics like spectroscopy earlier and relating them to previously learned concepts can help students learn the material more effectively compared to traditional methods of teaching these

1. joanna.brown@byu.net
Pedagogical Constructivism: Neuroscientific Evidence and
Implementation in Science Classrooms
JoAnna Brown
Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry
Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah 84602
719-580-3321
Fax: 801-422-0153

2. Abstract
Pedagogical constructivism is the teaching philosophy that knowledge is constructed in
the mind of the learner upon the learner’s prior knowledge. This teaching philosophy has been
successfully implemented in science classrooms. Students enter classrooms with different past
experiences that cause them to interpret information differently. Educators need to be aware of
this and draw out and correct any misconceptions students may have. This can be done through
personalized learning and peer instruction. Peer instruction also allows students to learn from
their peers who are in the process of learning the same information, rather than from a teacher
who may, unintentionally, apply hindsight bias. Past experience and knowledge is organized in
the brain in cognitive schemas. If students can assimilate new information with pre-existing
schemas, they are able to learn new information more quickly. Neuroscientists are beginning to
discover evidence for constructivist teaching methods through research on schemas and the
effects of repetition. When a person learns, neurons fire in the brain and oligodendrocytes
increase myelination on the activated axons. The more these pathways are traveled, the more
myelination occurs. Myelin increases conductivity along neural pathways—used to store
information in schemas—and allows that information to be accessed more quickly providing
faster recall times and increased memory. By incorporating prior knowledge and repetition in
science classrooms, students can learn difficult concepts more effectively.

3. Contents
Introduction..................................................................................................................................... 1
Opinions on Knowledge ............................................................................................................. 1
The Brain....................................................................................Error! Bookmark not defined.
Classroom Applications of Constructivism .................................................................................... 3
The Curse of Knowledge ............................................................................................................ 3
Misconceptions Facilitate Learning ............................................................................................ 5
Teaching Methods....................................................................................................................... 8
Neuroscientific Evidence for Cognitive Schemas ........................................................................ 10
Conclusions................................................................................................................................... 14
References..................................................................................................................................... 16

4. Brown – 1
Introduction
Opinions on Knowledge
Beginning with Socrates and Plato,1 philosophers have defined knowledge as justified,
true belief. This tri-tiered definition has caused many debates on what it means to know
something and what can actually be known. The traditional view of knowledge,2 realism, is that
to know something, the learner’s mind must contain an exact replica of reality and, therefore,
everyone’s knowledge is, and must be, exactly the same. This view suggests that we have an
idea of what goes into a person’s mind (stimulus) and what comes out (response), but we don’t
understand what goes on inside the brain during the learning process. It also suggests that this
process is irrelevant as long as the same conclusion is reached for all learners and they have a
copy of reality in their minds. Bodner,3 a constructivist, doesn’t agree with this philosophy;
instead, he suggests that we do know what is inside our minds and that a learner constructs
knowledge from given stimuli and previous experience. The learner simply tries to create
knowledge that “fits” with what is perceived as reality. This “fit” is much like how a key fits
into a lock; keys of many different shapes can open a given lock as long as the main points are
correct. Bodner says, “Each of us builds our own view of reality by trying to find order in the
chaos of signals that impinge on our senses. The only thing that matters is whether the
knowledge we construct from this information functions satisfactorily in the context in which it
arises.”
Lionni4 illustrated the idea of constructivism in his children’s book Fish is Fish. This
story is about a tadpole and a fish who are childhood friends. Over time, the tadpole grows into
a frog and goes to explore dry land. He returns to tell his friend, the fish, all about his adventures
and describes things he saw—cows, people, birds. The fish, having never lived above water,

5. Brown – 2
tries to imagine what these might look like. He pictures people as fish wearing clothes and
walking on their tail fins. The bird he imagines as a fish with beautiful wings, and the cow he
pictures as a fish with spotted fur and pink udders. Trying to imagine something he had never
seen before, he had to build on the knowledge he already had constructed of reality.
Bransford et al.5 says that students come to formal education with a wide range of prior
knowledge, skills, and beliefs that significantly influence what they notice about their
environment and how they organize and interpret information being taught and presented therein.
This is contrary to the “tabula rasa” philosophy of teaching and learning that suggests student
minds are blank slates teachers are to fill with information. Bodner3 argues that information
can’t simply be transferred unscathed from the mind of the teacher to the mind of the learner, but
that it needs to be built and organized in the mind of the learner to be remembered and used.
Jonassen6 pointed out that research in cognitive psychology utilized models from
cognitive science to construct theories about learning processes that supported this idea of
constructivism. Research is now beginning to investigate how people learn,7 how students
construct knowledge, and how education shapes the human mind,8 rather than on necessary
teaching skills9 and how to best get information into students’ minds.10
Kant11 believed that the brain is an active participant in constructing experience. He said
that our brain perceives our environment at each moment in time. It then applies “categories” to
these temporal slices to organize them to create experience. Piaget12 is credited with bringing
Kant’s idea of categories to cognitive psychology. He proposed the idea of a cognitive structure
called a “schema” in which related memories and knowledge are stored. He said that when we
encounter new information, we try to fit it with knowledge we already have in existing schemas.
If this new information fits, assimilation occurs and this new information is organized

6. Brown – 3
accordingly; if this information does not fit, then a process called accommodation occurs and an
existing schema is changed to allow for this new, differing information.
Neuroscientists are discovering evidence for these cognitive schemas, and this
information might help educators know how to best teach their students. A new area of research,
educational neuroscience, focuses on applying what is known about the brain to education. This
information can be useful in teaching, but there is some caution surrounding this area of study.
Multiple reviews13-18 point out the need for interdisciplinary training to establish successful
collaboration among neuroscientists and educators. This could help eliminate neurological
myths being cultivated that are based on misunderstandings, oversimplification, and premature
applications of neuroscience to a classroom. Neuroscientists are also cautious because lab results
can differ from observations in social situations. Lee17 calls for reliable research tools that focus
on interactions among brain, mind, and behavior to help bridge these gaps.
Pedagogical constructivism19 has been shown to be successful in science classrooms.
This review examines some of the results of implementation and also discusses the recent
advances in neuroscience that may support these constructivist teaching methods based on
repetition and prior knowledge organized into schemas. As teachers become aware of the
existence of schemas—in themselves and in their students—and how the brain processes
information, they may be able to recognize their hindsight bias and better help students construct
knowledge upon their existing past experience.
Classroom Applications of Constructivism
The Curse of Knowledge

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Newton20 performed an experiment with a group of volunteers she divided into “tappers”
and “listeners”. Each tapper was given a list of 25 well-known songs and was told to choose a
song and tap out the rhythm of the melody for a listener who would try to guess what song was
being tapped. Before the experiment, the tapper was to predict whether or not the listener would
guess the song correctly and what percentage of total listeners would be able to correctly identify
the song. On average, the tappers predicted that the listeners would be able to correctly identify
the song around 50 percent of the time; however, only 2.5 percent of the 120 songs (n = 3)
presented were identified correctly. This phenomenon is called hindsight bias or “The Curse of
Knowledge”. Massaro21 defines this as the tendency to see events that have already happened as
more predictable than they actually were before happening. This causes people to be biased by
their own knowledge when trying to understand others’ naïve or uninformed perspectives.
Bernstein et al.22 showed that this phenomenon appears in children and adults. Young
children, between the ages of three and five (n = 36, M = 55.5 months, range = 40 – 69 months,
22 female), and undergraduate students (n = 16, adult, eight female) were shown 32 images of
common objects on a computer screen that started out blurry and gradually became clear by
either the pixel or blur method shown in Figure 3. They were asked to judge when a peer would
accurately be able to identify each object. In both age groups, half of the participants were told
the identity of the objects prior to the experiment and the other half were not. Hindsight bias was
calculated as the ratio of the identification point of those with a priori knowledge divided by the
identification point of those without it. A ratio above 1.0 indicates hindsight bias, and the 95
percent confidence interval did not include 1.0 for any group. The average of the four groups’
hindsight bias ratios was 1.91 ± 0.22 and 1.69 ± 0.19 for the blur and pixel methods,

8. Brown – 5
respectively. Those who were told the identity beforehand overestimated the ability of someone
without this a priori knowledge to accurately identify the object.
Teachers teach material years after they first learned it. They have already developed
cognitive schemas for the information they are teaching and their hindsight bias can cause them
to struggle to relate to an obstacle students may be facing in understanding a concept that is new
to them. Chi23 investigated this idea and asked experts (professors) and novices (students) to
group physics problems into different categories. The novices grouped the problems according
to surface features such as the object in the problem (e.g., spring, pulley, inclined plane, etc.),
whereas the experts grouped the problems based on principles they would apply to solve the
problem (e.g., conservation of linear and angular momentum, statics, Newton’s second law,
conservation of energy, etc.). The professors had developed schema over years of solving
physics problems and were able to look at the big picture, deduce the method necessary to solve
the problem, interpret which information in the problem was useful, and categorize it
accordingly. The students didn’t have these schema in place, so they looked at the information
that was given and tried to make connections to equations they had memorized to try to
determine what steps to take and how to use these equations to get to the correct answer.
Bodner24 suggests that the difference between a problem and an exercise is the level of
familiarity. What is a novel problem to one may be a routine exercise to another. Teachers see
the problems they present to their students as exercises, but the students see them as problems.
He says that problem solving is “what you do when you don’t know what to do”.
Misconceptions Facilitate Learning

9. Brown – 6
Because students enter the classroom with preexisting schemas, teachers need to
understand how to address any preconceptions or misconceptions students may have before
trying to teach them new information. If they are not addressed, students will incorrectly
assimilate information to existing schemas rather than accommodate their schemas to fit the new
information. Brumby25 discusses how young children often believe that all moving things are
alive. Vosniadou et al.26 showed that some students came into her class thinking the earth was
flat. After being taught that it was actually round, they all seemed to understand; but, upon
interviewing the children, she found that they had constructed the incorrect idea that the earth
was flat and round like a pancake rather than round like a sphere. If teachers don’t have their
students discuss what they are learning to draw out these misconceptions, the teacher may not
even know they exist.
Champagne et al.,27 Brumby,25 and Gunstone et al.28 showed that students can appear to
have scientific knowledge and do well on standard exams given in a classroom, but when
presented with unfamiliar problems or real-life examples they often resort back to naïve
misconceptions they had when they first entered the classroom.
When Bodner and co-workers29 asked organic chemistry students to predict the products
of organic chemistry reactions, they were able to do so, but when asked to show the mechanism
of the same reaction, they weren’t able to come up with the answer as easily. The students had
simply memorized reactions without understanding the interactions taking place that would be
second-nature to an expert organic chemist. Similarly, when he30 asked general chemistry
students to draw Lewis dot structures, they performed the task with ease. When the same
students were asked to show what was happening with the electrons during a chemical reaction,
they were unable to make this connection. One student was able to come to a correct conclusion,

10. Brown – 7
but used incorrect logic. Misconceptions and misunderstandings can still exist and make the
student believe that what they know is true, when it actually might not be.
If these misconceptions are drawn out in the classroom through discussion or what
Piaget12 called disequilibration, they can actually help the student learn and accommodate the
new information into their existing schemas. Bodner2 explains that when a student comes to this
point of disequilibration, or a knowledge gap, they realize that there is a disconnect between
what they thought to be true and what they’re being taught and become motivated to understand
why. van Kesteren31 says this prediction error is a key factor that drives learning and that this
novelty of information and accommodation with an existing schema generally improves memory
of the new information.
Another way to draw out misconceptions in science classrooms is through
demonstrations. Mazur and co-workers32 showed that when demonstrations are used in a
classroom and students are simply required to passively observe, they learn little or nothing at all
from them and they are no better off in understanding the underlying concept than a student who
hadn’t seen the demonstration at all. One out of every five students was shown to even
remember the demonstration inaccurately and remember it coming to an incorrect conclusion.33
When the students were taught the concept before being shown the demonstration and were
given time to think and predict what was going to happen and draw on prior knowledge before
seeing the demonstration, more were able to accurately remember the outcome of the
demonstration. Roth et al.34 showed that only four out of ten students remembered the correct
outcome of a demonstration on angular momentum in a follow-up interview, and only three out
of ten were able to show it as a vector the way it was shown during the lecture demonstration.

11. Brown – 8
When demonstrations are used constructively, they become more useful as a learning/teaching
tool rather than entertainment.
The verbal-linguistic and visual representations used in classrooms need to be connected
to reality. Without relating new information—chemical reactions—with previous knowledge—
Lewis dot diagrams—the students may not make these connections on their own even though
they may seem second-nature to the teacher. If the information is only used and discussed in the
unit in which it is presented for the first time, it won’t be remembered as well as if it is connected
to previously-learned material.
Teaching Methods
Overcoming hindsight bias and misconceptions can be difficult. Mazur and co-workers35-
38 suggest implementing peer-instruction in the classroom to help combat these learning and
teaching obstacles. This allows students the opportunity to reteach the material to their peers.
During this time of discussion, they can help each other overcome learning barriers that they
have just overcome themselves. This also allows for each student to get personalized instruction
which can bring out any misconceptions they may have on the topic.
Table 1 describes an inquiry-based teaching model called the 5E Learning Cycle that has
been implemented in science classrooms at the high school39 and undergraduate40 level. This
method consists of five parts: engage, explore, explain, elaborate, and evaluate. The engagement
and exploration portion of the learning cycle allows all students to have a common starting point
to use and refer back to as their prior knowledge as they have discussions while learning the new
topic. Once the learning cycle is completed, the students will have had multiple opportunities to

12. Brown – 9
have discussions about the information with their peers and have the new information presented
to them multiple times in a variety of ways.
Maxwell and co-workers41 noticed that Maxwell’s organic chemistry students seemed to
consistently receive low exam scores when tested on spectroscopy in her second semester
organic chemistry class. Because of this, they analyzed current editions of organic chemistry
textbooks and found that most introduced the analyzing of spectra around chapter 12.
Traditionally, professors teach this topic during the second semester of an organic chemistry
sequence so that students will first be familiar with common structures, functional groups, and
relationships within molecules before learning this difficult skill. This method of teaching these
topics wasn’t benefitting Maxwell’s students so she decided to implement a new, constructivist
teaching strategy and introduce IR spectroscopy and 1H NMR spectrometry during the first week
of the first semester of her organic chemistry sequence. Table 2 discusses the evolution of her
teaching method over the years that she used this method. During the first semester of the
sequence, students were to match IR absorptions to functional group, create 1H NMR correlation
chart, and circle the correct structure that these correlated to on the homework from four
multiple-choice answers. During the second semester, they were to draw and name a compound,
calculate the index of hydrogen deficiency, identify important peaks in IR, and show correlation
charts for NMR when given molecular formula and either IR and 1H NMR or 1H NMR and 13C
NMR. Students were tested on these topics during each semester. Thirty-five percent of the
first-semester final exam was multiple-choice spectra questions; the second-semester final exam
was eighty percent spectra with free response questions. Figure 4 shows the students’ exam
scores during second semesters and Figure 5 shows the trend of the percentage of the class that
passed the exam with a score of 70 percent or higher and the percentage that failed. Over the

13. Brown – 10
years, exam scores improved while Maxwell taught using this method. In 2008, she had
developed a large enough question bank to allow each student to have a unique homework set
and eliminate cheating.
Bodner42 used this same idea by relating the way he taught multiple topics in
undergraduate chemistry classes. He related the common-ion effect of buffers and the effect of
LeChatelier’s principle on salt solubility. He also used similar tables and examples when
showing conjugate pairs in RedOx reactions and Brønsted acid-base reactions by showing how
both involve the transfer of particles, both involve relative strengths of conjugate pairs, both have
methods of determining whether or not a reaction will happen based on relative strengths of
oxidizing/reducing agents and acids/bases and what the relative strength of the conjugate will be,
and both have constants—cell potentials and equilibrium constants—that can help make
predictions about the reactions as well. When he began making these connections in his
classroom, 95 percent of students were able to answer the following question correctly on an
exam:
“NaHCO3 (aq) can be used to neutralize strong bases, such as NaOH. What
conclusion can be drawn from the fact that the following acid-base reaction
proceeds to the right as written?
HCO3
–(aq) + OH–(aq) ↔ CO3
2–(aq) + H2O(l)
(a) HCO3
– is a stronger acid than H2O
(b) HCO3
– is a stronger base than CO3
2–
(c) HCO3
– is a stronger base than OH–
(d) CO3
2– is a stronger base than OH–
(e) H2O is a stronger acid than HCO3
– ”
Neuroscientific Evidence for Cognitive Schemas
When a brain is presented with any type of information, neurons are activated. The
human brain consists of approximately 100 billion neurons through which electrical and

14. Brown – 11
chemical signals travel.43 Figure 1 shows the basic structure of a neuron. These nerve cells
contain all the features of a normal, human cell within the cell body. Connected to the cell body
is the axon, which makes up about 95 percent of the volume of the cell; in humans, the axon can
be up to one meter long.44 The axon is connected to the cell body by the axon hillock and is
surrounded by a lipid material called myelin,45 which acts as a conductor for electrical
impulses.46 Neural signals, action potentials consisting of sodium and potassium ions,47-48
generate in the axon hillock and travel through the myelinated axon to axon terminals where they
are transferred as chemical neurotransmitters across synapses to other nerve cells. Dendrites
branch off from the cell body in many different directions and are where these signals are
received. This propagation of signals through myelinated axons and dendrites allows for the
transmission of information across hundreds of neurons at speeds up to 100 m/s.44
Axons are myelinated through their interactions with another cell type in the brain called
neuroglia, or simply glia. Oligodendrocytes are the glial cells that myelinate axons in the central
nervous system, and they often interact with multiple axons at one time.49 Figure 2 shows an
oligodendrocyte myelinating axons. To do this, the glial cell comes in contact with the activated
axon(s), becomes flat, and winds the lipid membrane around the axon(s). This creates multiple
insulating layers that increase axonal conductivity. The more a certain pathway of axons is used,
the more it is myelinated; this pathway of least resistance is what neurons will transmit
information through when a similar experience is encountered. Javanbakht50 says these
pathways are the physical structures associated with the idea of cognitive schemas that develop
and become myelinated during learning and exposure to new experiences.
McKenzie et al.51 showed that as rats learn, information is presented to the hippocampus
through the firing of neurons and is organized into schemas where it is stored with existing

15. Brown – 12
related memories. Ten rats were trained to choose a specific item depending on the context they
were placed in—item X in context 0 and item Y in context 00. After 7.0 ± 0.7 days and 202 ±
23.8 trials (mean ± SE), the rats were able to perform the tasks in the different contexts with an
accuracy above 80 percent (n = 83) for 12 consecutive trials. Number of trials to criterion were
strongly correlated (r = 0.995, p < 0.0004). In subsequent trials, items X and Y were replaced
first with items A and B, then with items C and D, and the rats were trained to perform the same
task with these new objects within the same contexts. Nine of the ten rats were able to perform
the task above 80 percent with the new object sets with fewer trials than the original XY set
(69.6 ± 13.1 for AB and 70.6 ± 3.8 for CD) with an accuracy above 80 percent after the first day
(XY versus AB p = 0.008, AB versus XY p = 0.002, AB versus CD p > 0.05). The rats had
acquired a general schema for the association by completing the initial problem. This allowed
them to relate the new object tasks in the same context back to the schema already developed and
the prior knowledge acquired. Although they were presented with different objects, they were
able to perform the task in a shorter amount of time because it was presented to them in a context
they were familiar with.
Heusser et al.52 also showed that prior exposure to a concept can aid in the subsequent
processing of that same information. He analyzed 16 volunteers—seven male and nine female—
who were all healthy, native English-speakers. Each person was presented with an initial
stimulus (i.e., a spoken noun, a picture of an object or scene, or a written noun) and up to four
(mean 2.5) various subsequent stimuli in which the initial stimulus was repeated in the either the
same (1/3 of the time) or a different modality (2/3 of the time). There were three within-modal
conditions (SS—spoken nouns preceded by spoken nouns, PP—pictures preceded by pictures,
WW—written nouns preceded by written nouns) and 6 cross-modal conditions (PS—spoken

16. Brown – 13
nouns preceded by pictures, WS—spoken nouns preceded by written nouns, SP—pictures
preceded by spoken nouns, WP—pictures preceded by written nouns, PW—written nouns
preceded by pictures, SW—written nouns preceded by spoken nouns). The volunteers were
presented with 285 items, grouped into 9 sets of 26 items each, and were to indicate, by pressing
a button as quickly as they could, whether the item presented was natural or manmade. The
items were presented in a continuous stream; pictures and written nouns were presented for 0.25
s and spoken nouns varied from 0.5 s to 1.0 s depending on the length of the word. Correct
answers in the initial presentations went up significantly from 90.79 percent (SD = 0.04) on the
initial presentation of the repeated object to 94.45 percent (SD = 0.03; paired t-test p < 0.0001)
on the repeated presentation. Overall, participants were faster in answering the question the
second time the item was presented to them (all ps < 0.05). Imaging of the brain also showed
that there was a suppression in brain activity in many regions of the brain during the second
presentation of the item. This was especially true in the perirhinal cortex (PRc) which may
contribute to storing conceptual information and receives auditory, visual, and somatosensory
inputs from other regions of the brain, including the posterior parahippocampal cortex. This
suggests that information may be received and organized in the hippocampus, since it is the part
of the brain attributed with organizing new information and creating memories, and then sent to
the PRc for assimilation or accommodation to be stored in long-term memory since short-term
memory only holds about seven items of information.53 Researchers31, 54-56 have also proposed
association among the hippocampus as well as the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and medial
temporal lobe (MTL) as they become long-term memories through a process called SLIMM
(schema-linked interactions between medial prefrontal and medial temporal regions).

17. Brown – 14
Javanbakht50 says these patterns are later used in recognition when encountering a new
experience to encode, consolidate, and retrieve information. Within SLIMM (and adaptive
resonance theory), it is thought that the main function of the mPFC is to determine resonance.
This means it detects congruency between new information and existing information held within
schemas in the neocortex. The more a pathway or pattern is utilized, the more stabilized and
fixated it becomes and the speed of access as well as memorability is increased. This increased
speed of the action potential through the neural pathway is due to increased myelination of the
axons used.
Mechanisms for oligodendrocyte selectivity have been proposed,57 but the precise
mechanism is still unknown. It has been demonstrated58-61 that axonal activity while learning a
new skill promotes oligodendrocyte progenitor cell (OPC) proliferation as well as increased
myelination by mature oligodendrocytes in the area of the brain where neural firing is occurring
in both rats and humans.
Conclusions
What is known about how the brain utilizes schemas in storing, organizing, and recalling
information may help teachers understand how their students learn and, thus, how to best design
instruction for their science classrooms.
Teachers are able to come to conclusions much faster than students because they have
myelinated the necessary neural pathways over and over again, and students haven’t even
developed these neural connections yet.
There is no quick-fix solution or direct procedures educators can rely on for teaching, but
developments from neuroscience can be used to aid teachers in understanding how the brain
processes information. More research needs to be done to accurately identify the mechanisms

18. Brown – 15
that signal myelination of axons, but it has been shown that axonal activity promotes
myelination. When students learn something for the first time, they will either associate or
assimilate that information within existing schemas where memories and knowledge are stored.
Instructors need to remember that students don’t have these schema in place and forming them
takes time, repetition, practice, and correcting of misconceptions. As more research is done and
better research methods are developed allowing experiments to be reliable in a lab as well as in
social situations, the neuroscience behind learning will be better understood.
There will always be a need for some degree of lecturing in the classroom, but teachers
need to transition away from the traditional method of teaching where the all eyes are at the front
of the room while busy hands scribble down notes the students will later memorize and
regurgitate on exams; this is not conducive to how the brain assimilates and accommodates
information into existing schemas. When motor skills are at work alongside learning, more
neurons are firing causing more mental activity and more myelination of axons which allows for
quicker recall. Students need to be able to interact with each other during class and have
common starting points to use as a basis from which to build new knowledge upon. New
information also needs to be presented more than once so that schemas can form and at
subsequent times be drawn from to assimilate new information.
As educators and neuroscientists begin to collaborate, great progress will be seen in
education systems because teachers will be able to understand how their students’ minds will
learn best and allow them to not only be successful on exams, but be able to use the scientific
knowledge gained in the classroom in everyday situations because it has been assimilated into
schema triggered by their day to day interactions.

19. Brown – 16
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23. a Information from Ref. 46
Table 1. Descriptions of the steps of the 5E learning cyclea
Engagement Captures attention, promotes thinking raises questions, identifies
misconceptions; generate comments, makes connection with prior knowledge
Exploration Poses questions that allow students to test ideas, hypotheses, and alternatives;
students make observations, collect data and reach decisions
Explanation Traditional teaching phase; past experiences are used to explain terms and
concepts; students use observations and evidence to create and test
explanations
Elaboration Deepens understanding by using concepts in new situations; students apply
knowledge and skills in a new but similar situation
Evaluation Pre, formative, and post assessments occur throughout the learning cycle

24. Table 2. Evolution of Maxwell’s constructive teaching method in organic chemistry
coursesa
Homework Problems
First Used
Semester
in Sequence Lecture Time (h)
Number of
Questions Answer Type Problem Sets
Summer
2002
2 9 10 Free response Identical
Fall
2002
1 6 20
Multiple-choice with
reasoning
Some duplicates
2 6 – 8 20 Free response Some duplicates
Spring 2008
1 6 20
Multiple-choice with
reasoning
Some duplicates
2 6 – 8 20 Free Response Unique
Spring 2009
1 6 20
Multiple-choice with
reasoning
Unique
2 6 – 8 20 Free Response Unique
a Information from Ref. 48

25. Figure Captions
Figure 1. Structure of a neuron. Adapted from ref. 20 with permission from instructor.
Figure 2. Representation of oligodendrocyte myelinating an axon. Adapted from ref. 21 with
permission from instructor.
Figure 3. When testing the effect of hindsight bias, participants viewed images gradually
becoming clearer in the blur (left) and pixel (right) method. Adapted from ref. 29 with
permission from instructor.
Figure 4. Final exam scores during second semesters of Maxwell’s organic chemistry classes
before and after implementation of the constructive teaching method of introducing spectroscopy
during the first week of the first semester of the organic chemistry sequence. Data from ref. 48.
Figure 5. Overall trend in passing and failing exam scores during second semesters of
Maxwell’s organic chemistry classes before and after implementation of the constructive
teaching method of introducing spectroscopy during the first week of the first semester of the
organic chemistry sequence. Passing score is 70 percent or above. Data from ref. 48.

26. Figure 1
Axon Terminal

27. Figure 2

28. Figure 3

29. Figure 4

30. Figure 5