The Negative Heuristic and Criticisms of Constructivism in Science Education

Chapter 4 modelled the dominant research tradition in Science Education as a Research Programme (RP), and identified the programme's hard core and heuristics to guide research. That tradition has commonly been labelled as ‘constructivism in science education’ although this term is used in diverse ways by different commentators. This chapter uses the RP model to examine a number of key criticisms of the notion of constructivism and associated research in Science Education. The chapter explains the nature of the criticisms, and considers how they relate to the RP detailed in Chapter 4. Some criticisms are shown to refer to views that are irrelevant to the RP's hard core and therefore cannot be seen as criticisms of the RP itself. Others may be excluded by the ‘negative heuristic’ of the RP because they are based on premises that are actually inconsistent with the hard-core commitments of the programme. It will be shown that other criticisms relate to specific ‘ refutable variants’ that have been proposed within the RP and these criticisms should be considered as part of valid scientific debate within the programme rather than criticism of the programme itself. Finally, the suggestion that the research tradition itself has ceased to be a useful referent for the field is acknowledged, but deferred to Chapter 6 which will evaluate progress in the RP.