Dewey (1933) provides a simple illustration in contrasting what he calls
the fact of the sphericity of the earth versus the student’s meaningful idea of
it, generated through a well-designed experience. Initially, the spherical nature
of the earth is a distant abstraction, a disembodied verbal fact with no intellectual
meaning. To make it a working idea requires more than a definition and
a globe. It requires helping the student see by constructivist work and coaching
the value of the idea for making sense of particular experiences, especially
relevant puzzling or inconsistent facts: