oups has encouraged us to reflect on our own practice and has led to significant developments in our practice and in our understanding of how best to implement a constructivist approach in the classroom. Areas where our practice has changed significantly have included the purpose of elicitation, the link between elicitation and restructuring and how the learners' ideas can be taken into account.
We recognise that our views about constructivist principles and practice may be based on a misunderstanding of some aspects of the relevant literature. However we have first-hand evidence that our views about the difficulty of putting constructivist ideas into practice are shared by many teachers. If we have misunderstood the implications of the literature then we suspect that many teachers share our misunderstanding, and we would see it as a priority for research groups to attempt to minimise any possible misunderstandings of the implications of their work. It is encouraging Nuffield Primary Science, which is based firmly on the SPACE Research Project, has recognised the importance of the issues that we have raised and has begun to address them in its most recent publication (Nuffield 1996), pointing out the distinction between research and teaching. We hope that our research will help to promote further development of constructivist frameworks in the future.
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