Designers face varied, often competing, demands across different disciplines and clients. This has stimulated significant but divergent demands from social scientists, professional educators, training professionals, basic scientists, and K12 and post-secondary educators. While prospects appear unlimited, the approach needed to address these design challenges continues to be disputed. Disagreements concerning the role and influence of differing theoretical, philosophical, epistemological and pedagogical perspectives on design have been debated for more than a century, but with little resolution (see, e.g. R.E. Clark, 1983; Kozma, 1991; Sheehan & Johnson, 2012). Constructivists, for example, define learning as “a change in social activity that integrates what is known with how one came to know it” (Tobias & Duffy, 2009, p. 8). They present evidence that different approaches facilitate learning, especially for ill-structured problems and in ill-structured domains. Critics, however, question the basis for these assertions as well as the implications for associated design practices. Criticisms have been levied against a range of learning approaches including discovery, problem-based, experiential, and inquiry-based teaching. While the debates often center on constructivism versus objectivism, I argue that the design issues require close examination of underlying theories, epistemologies and research appropriate for directed versus non-directed approaches to support learning. © 2013 Taylor & Francis.
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