Barber and Fullan (2005) assert that the moral purpose of education is to raise the bar on student achievement and narrow the gap, while Kivunja (2014) states that “the value of what we teach is not just the pedagogical content knowledge, but in the process of its application to real-life situations to solve problems” (Kivunja, 2014, p.87). Raising the bar for academic achievement in the context of real-life problem solving seems to be particularly hard to achieve. Many academic interventions in the curricula of higher education have been conceived to address the problem. This paper reports on the design, implementation, analysis and comparative evaluation of two tertiary-level constructivist educational interventions founded on situated knowledge construction and close to real-world problem solving. The emphasis for learners was not on the elicitation of intact knowledge structures but on providing those learners with the means to create novel and situation-specific understanding by combining prior knowledge with newly acquired knowledge and skills (Ertmer and Newby, 1993). Findings suggest that, in the early years of tertiary education, applied constructivism is disruptive. Rather than achieving its objectives, students are somewhat daunted by the prospect of embracing constructivist pedagogy, however in the latter years, students are more accepting of the pedagogical change and thrive on the challenge.

In the context of computing education, normal teaching practice is curriculum based, focusing on lecturer-derived content and on finding mechanisms to ensure the efficient transfer of knowledge. For each module, students are awarded a grade based on summative assessment and examination. Concerns relating to grade inflation and surface learning have emerged in recent years with the advent of AI. Biggs et al. (2001) state that “the generic aim of good teaching is to encourage students to adopt a deep approach and to discourage the use of a surface approach” (Biggs, Kember and Leung, 2001, p.5). Surface learning describes a context in which students glaze over module content focusing on regurgitating knowledge without understanding the context or application. The problem, according to Biggs et al. is not that the student is cursed with a surface learning ‘style’, but that under current conditions of teaching and assessment, the student makes a strategic decision to adopt a surface approach that will pay grading dividends (Biggs, Kember and Leung, 2001, p.6). Embodiment of surface learning by students is indicative that something is not quite right with current teaching approaches. A worrying statistic is that students are increasingly becoming surface learning oriented and correspondingly, less deep in their learning orientation (Biggs, 1987; Watkins and Hattie, 1995; Miller and Bell, 2016; Vermunt and Donche, 2017; Evans and Waring, 2018). Consequently, educational interventions have tended to concentrate on those that orient the student to become a deep learner. This paper focuses on constructivism as a means of creating an educational environment that promotes deep learning and the paper further discusses the implications of applying the methodology in the second year and fourth year of a four-year computing degree programme.

Keywords: Constructivism, Deep Learning, Problem-based Learning, Surface Learning, Activity Theory.