Constructivism - a brief definition

Constructivism is a learning psychology theory which states that human experience and learning is subject to neural, cognitive and social processes. Its core premise is that the learning process entails the learner creating an individual representation of the world. What we learn under certain conditions doesn't necessarily depend on ourselves as learners and our expriences; instead the learning process relies more heavily on the interaction between our expriences and concepts. It was suggested by its founder -Jean Piaget- that knowledge is internalised when it's contructed through processes of accommodation and assimilation. Assimilation happens when someone fits the sensations and conclusions of some new experience into an inner mental framework. This inner framework is said to be the individual representation of the world as mentioned above; it's a way of viewing things in an expected way in a somewhat predictable pattern. More often than not, though, this inner representation of the world may fail to receive the experience input in the most earnest manner. This occurrance may prompt the individual to alter their feelings, conclusions and perceptions of the experienced event, rather than the build of their inner representation of the world. Making meaningful alterations in one's cognitive framework is the process of accommodation. This often comes with an accompanying feeling of failure at understanding something which didn't happen according to expectations as dictated by previous expriences and knowledge of the world.

Next time you're tallying up the questions you had to answer in a test, you can think of them as queries you had to either box into an accommodation or an assimilation category rather than right or wrong.

Constructivism is often thought of as an approach to promote active learning. However, since it plainly involves a trial and error method, actual knowledge may be hard to be derived on the short term. It should thus be seasoned with directed instruction from a more competent peer and other teaching approaches which may prove to be more effective to the context at hand.