Constructivism is a relatively recent term used to represent a collection of theories, including (among others) generative learning, discovery learning, and situated learning. The common thread among these theories is the idea that individuals actively construct knowledge by working to solve realistic problems, usually in collaboration with others.

The constructivist perspective describes learning as a change in meaning constructed from experience. While the information processing perspective defines knowledge as an objective representation of our experience, the constructivist perspective defines knowledge as an individual interpretation of experience. Thus, knowledge construction is a process of thinking about and interpreting experience.

According to the constructivist perspective, learning is determined by the complex interplay among students’ existing knowledge, the social context, and the problem to be solved. Instruction, then, refers to providing students with a collaborative situation in which they have both the means and the opportunity to construct new and situationally-specific understanding by assembling prior knowledge from diverse sources . The teacher’s role therefore is to model and guide instruction by:

• Posing “good” problems
• Creating group learning activities
• providing direction in the process of the knowledge construction, consistent with the experiences and knowledge level of their students
  

Jean Piaget
Lev Vygotsky
John Dewey

Examples of constructivism in practice might include:

• Students in an architecture class become familiar with a multiparty design process, through collaborative learning.
• Students in a poetry class provide online peer reviews of one another's work to develop critical reading skills.
• Law students in a seminar take turns studying the material in advance and give lectures to gain skills in rhetoric and public speaking.
  

Sources
1.Newby, Theory into Application, 1996
2. Digital Media Center, University of minnesota, http://dmc.umn.edu/tenets/theories.shtml
3. Ertmer & Newby, Performance Improvement Quarterly, 6(4), p63