How Do Teachers Interpret The Term 'Constructivism' As A Teaching Approach In The Riyadh Primary Schools Context?

The constructivist view of learning has been receiving a great deal of attention in the last three decades, because of its impact on science and mathematics education. However, while many educators stressed that there is a difficulty in translating a constructivist theory of learning into the practice of teaching, constructivism helps inform teaching and reminds educators that the learner must be at the centre of pedagogies. This paper report on a study designed to investigate the application, or possibility for the application, of constructivism in Riyadh primary mathematics classes. A survey was conducted to find out how teachers in Riyadh interpret the term constructivism as a teaching approach. Altogether 136 responses, 98 for mathematics teachers, and 38 for pre-service teachers participated in the survey. The instrument used to collect data is a published questionnaire called " The Constructivist Learning Environment Survey (CLES)" with three additional scales added taken from " What is happening in this Class Questionnaire". In this study and after analysing the data, it is apparent that all correlation coefficients have statistical significance at level 0.01, which indicates very satisfactory internal consistency for all scales, and were fluctuated from 0.57 to 0.84. The results found were that primary mathematics teachers in Riyadh are concerned with helping students learn and like working with students. However, often demanding silent classrooms, they have limited understanding of constructivism class control. Furthermore, teachers do not seem to have confidence in a classroom environment where student prior knowledge is evaluated and built on. (C) 2014 Published by Elsevier Ltd.