What Constructivism Claims
Constructivism is based on the idea that people actively construct or make their own knowledge, and that reality is determined by the learner’s own experiences. Learners use prior knowledge as a foundation and build on it with new things they learn — meaning everyone’s individual experiences make their learning unique to them.
Four Principles of Constructivism
| Principle | What It Means |
| Knowledge is constructed | Knowledge builds on other knowledge — students assemble pieces in their own unique way, building something different from what another student builds. |
| Knowledge is personal | Since constructivism rests on personal experience and belief, knowledge becomes a personal affair — everyone brings different prior knowledge to the table. |
| Learning exists in the mind | Hands-on experience and physical action matter, but aren’t sufficient alone — engaging the mind, not just the hands, is key to successful learning. |
| Motivation is key to learning | Unmotivated students cannot learn; educators need real ways to engage and excite learners, since motivation is what lets a learner reach into past experience to make new connections. |
Discovery Learning by Bruner
Discovery Learning is the active process of inquiry-based instruction that encourages learners to build on prior knowledge through experience, and to search for new information and relationships based on their own interests. Bruner was one of the founding fathers of constructivist theory; his framework rests on the idea that a learner constructs new ideas or concepts based on existing knowledge, and that learning is an active process. Bruner emphasised the significance of categorisation in learning: ‘To perceive is to categorise, to conceptualize is to categorize, to learn is to form categories, to make decisions is to categorize.’
Four Features of Bruner’s Theory of Instruction
| Feature | What It Covers |
| Predisposition to learn | The motivational, cultural, and personal experiences that move a learner toward a love of learning in general or of something specific — Bruner emphasised social factors and the early influence of teachers and parents. |
| Structure of knowledge | Knowledge can be structured in ways that make it easier for the learner to grasp; understanding a subject’s fundamental structure makes it more comprehensible, with categorisation as the key organising process. |
| Modes of representation | Representations can be Enactive (learning through actions on physical objects), Iconic (learning through models and pictures), or Symbolic (the capacity to think in abstract terms). |
| Effective sequencing | Learners differ individually, so how material is sequenced can make learning easier or harder — sequencing shapes the whole learning process. |
Based on the three modes of representation, Bruner recommended combining concrete, then pictorial, then symbolic activities in sequence for more effective learning.
Piaget’s Cognitive Constructivism
Jean Piaget, a Swiss child psychologist, rejected the idea that learning is the passive assimilation of given knowledge. Instead, he proposed that learning is a dynamic process comprising successive stages of adaptation to reality, during which learners actively construct knowledge by creating and testing their own theories of the world. Piaget’s theory of cognitive development proposes that humans cannot simply be ‘given’ information they immediately understand and use — instead, humans must construct their own knowledge, built through experience, which creates schemas: mental models in their heads representing a set of perceptions, ideas, and actions that go together.
Schemas change, enlarge, and become more sophisticated through two complementary processes:
- Assimilation — the process by which a person takes material into their mind from the environment, sometimes changing the evidence of their senses to make it fit their existing schema.
- Accommodation — the difference made to one’s mind or concepts by the process of assimilation.
The basic principle underlying Piaget’s theory is equilibration: all cognitive development — intellectual and affective — progresses toward increasingly complex and stable levels of organisation, taking place through assimilation of new information into existing cognitive structures, and accommodation of that information by forming new structures.
Piaget’s Four Stages (Revisited for Learning)
| Stage | Age | What Happens |
| Sensorimotor | 0–2 yrs | Children move from instinctual drives and undifferentiated emotion toward organised concrete concepts; outlook is egocentric — unable to take others’ viewpoints into account. |
| Preoperational | 2–7 yrs | Children begin using language to make sense of reality, learning to classify objects by different criteria and manipulate numbers. |
| Concrete Operational | 7–12 yrs | Children think more logically but remain rigid, struggling with abstract/hypothetical concepts; they become less egocentric, realising others may think and feel differently. |
| Formal Operational | 12 yrs+ | Logic, deductive reasoning, and abstract understanding increase; learners become capable of seeing multiple potential solutions and thinking scientifically. |
Vygotsky’s Social Constructivism
Lev Vygotsky shared many of Piaget’s views on child development but was more interested in the social aspects of learning. He argued that all cognitive functions originate in, and must be explained as products of, social interactions — learning wasn’t simply the assimilation and accommodation of new knowledge by individual learners, but the process by which learners are integrated into a knowledge community. In Vygotsky’s classroom, the teacher is typically active and involved, providing varied learning materials and experiences, while classroom culture supplies cognitive tools like language, cultural history, and social context.
Vygotsky’s best-known concept is the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) — the observation that children, learning a task or body of information, start out unable to do it, can then do it with the assistance of an adult or older mentor (scaffolding), and finally can do it independently. The ZPD is specifically the stage where a child can perform a task assisted, but not yet alone — which is exactly why a teacher’s role is to guide a child through this middle zone.
Vygotsky also proposed a relationship between language and thought that differs from Piaget: up to about age two, thought and speech develop independently — with speech having a pre-intellectual stage where words are properties of objects rather than symbols for them. After that point, thought and speech become interdependent, thought becomes verbal, and children’s private monologues become internalised as inner dialogue guiding self-regulation.
Ausubel’s Theory of Meaningful Verbal Learning (Reception Learning)
According to David Ausubel’s theory, to learn meaningfully, a person must relate new knowledge to what they already know — the most important single factor influencing learning, in Ausubel’s view, is what the learner already knows. New concepts can be incorporated into more inclusive, broader concepts or ideas, which Ausubel called advance organizers.
Advance organizers are verbal statements presented at the start of a lesson that preview and structure new material, linking it to the learner’s existing knowledge. They’re general enough to cover all the information to be learned, and serve as an anchor holding new information together — providing mental scaffolding for what follows. Their exact form depends on the content type, the learner’s age, and how familiar students already are with the material.
| Type of Advance Organizer | Function |
| Expository Organizer | Makes appropriate prerequisite knowledge available to the learner by providing new information. |
| Comparative Organizer | Builds external connections with existing, relevant knowledge by reminding the learner of what they already know. |
Meaningful Verbal Learning and Subsumption
Meaningful verbal learning is the acquisition of ideas linked to other ideas — it happens through the interaction between a new concept (the subsumed) and more inclusive concepts already learned (the subsumer). This linking process is called subsumption, and it modifies both the subsumer and the subsumed concept. Two types exist: derivative subsumption, where new information is derived easily from an already-existing mental structure (comparable to Piaget’s assimilation — e.g., a new example of ‘mammal’ when the category is already understood), and correlative subsumption, where the new information requires the existing structure itself to be altered.
