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What Murphy and Gash are attempting to do is to solve a significant problem some students have being successful in school, one that is not often addressed in any significant way. The language used to describe the lessons has some significant departures from radical constructivism. It is, no doubt, beneficial that the students in the study may have developed improvements in self-image, but, as seen in other work, the application of radical constructivism to develop and extend the work started in the study could result in more and more lasting improvements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the influences of radical constructivism (RC) in education research and practices for developing teacher's teaching methods. It mentions the constructivist epistemology in the study of cognitive development and social justice in student's learning ability. It conclude the role of student's social interaction in student's cognitive and psychological development with RC.

For a little over 40 years, what we label now, physics education research, has been conducted. As a result, new themes in the research in physics learning and in physics education have emerged. Some of these themes are cognitivism, qualitative research, learning as construction of knowledge, epistemological underpinnings that are not realist, student understanding-driven pedagogies, and scholarship in fields outside physics. These themes have arisen in minds of our colleagues, who focus their attention on students' understandings of physical phenomena, instead of how well the students do on conventional tests. Physics education research shows that alternative pedagogies result in a wider range of students making much greater changes in their understanding of the phenomena than the conventional pedagogies, far beyond mere statistical significance. Yet, these themes are still just themes and not major changes in physics teaching as a whole enterprise. Since we know these pedagogies are better for our students and thereby for our culture, the challenge becomes one of how to overcome the hegemonic pressures pushing back toward the status quo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]