Constructivism! The increase in frequency with which this word appears in the discourse of educational research, theory, and policy is truly remarkable. Unfortunately much of the discussion is at the level of slogan and cliche even bromide. "Students should construct their own knowledge" is being reverentially chanted throughout the halls of many a school/college/department of education these days, and any approach that is other than constructivist is characterized as promoting passive, rote, and sterile learning. For example, consider Rogoff's (1994) description of what she calls the adult-run model of how learning occurs:

Constructivism: Implications for the Design and Delivery of Instruction

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The nature and measurement of meaning.

Localized, task-induced decreases in cerebral blood flow are a frequent finding in functional brain imaging research but remain poorly understood. One account of these phenomena postulates processes ongoing during conscious, resting states that are interrupted or inhibited by task performance. Psychological evidence suggests that conscious humans are engaged almost continuously in adaptive processes involving semantic knowledge retrieval, representation in awareness, and directed manipulation of represented knowledge for organization,problem-solving, and planning. If interruption of such ''conceptual'' processes accounts for task-induced deactivation, tasks that also engage these conceptual processes should not cause deactivation. Furthermore, comparisons between conceptual and nonconceptual tasks should show activation during conceptual tasks of the same brain areas that are ''deactivated'' relative to rest. To test this model, functional magnetic resonance imaging data were acquired during a resting state,a perceptual task,and a semantic retrieval task. A network of left-hemisphere polymodal cortical regions showed higher signal values during the resting state than during the perceptual task but equal values during the resting and semantic conditions. This result is consistent with the proposal that perceptual tasks interrupt processes ongoing during rest that involve many of the same brain areas engaged during semantic retrieval. As further evidence for this model, the same network of brain areas was activated in two direct comparisons between semantic and perceptual processing tasks. This same ''conceptual processing'' network was also identified in several previous studies that contrasted semantic and perceptual tasks or resting and active states. The model proposed here offers a unified account of these findings and may help to explain several unanticipated results from prior studies of semantic processing.

Conceptual Processing during the Conscious Resting State: A Functional MRI Study

The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct

Wallace, Tylor, Wundt, Johannesson, and others have proposed that human language had its basis in hand and arm gestures. The Gardners' work with the chimpanzee Washoe, Premack's study of the chimpanzee Sarah, and continuing experiments along these lines indicate that neural restructuring would not have been necessary for the protohominid acquisition of a simple propositional gesture or sign language which did not involve cross-modal transfer at a high level from the visual to the auditory channel or vice versa. Evidence from primate studies, early tool-using, the continuing functions of gesture in human communication, lateral dominance in its relation to speech and tool manipulation, and other sources is presented to support a model of glottogenesis. It is argued that a preexisting gestural language system would have provided an easier pathway to vocal language than a direct outgrowth of the "emotional" use of vocalization characteristic of nonhuman primates.

Primate Communication and the Gestural Origin of Language

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Daniel J. Bronstein

Papers

Signs, Language, and Behavior.