"In a constructivist classroom, students continually try out ideas and practices for themselves...the models that an individual constructs in his or her mind are crucial to understanding and nonunderstanding."
-Howard Gardner

Click to dowload a philosophical explanation of the theory.

The "case" for constructivism is made in the November, 1999 issue of Educational Leadership (an ASCD publication), but the argument for progressivism has been raging for almost a century. John Dewey, "forefather" of the movement and esteemed educational philosopher espoused his views in such classics as Education and Democracy.
 
The root word of constructivism is, of course, construct. The fundamental premise of the theory is that children actively construct their knowledge. Rather than simply absorbing ideas spoken to them by their teachers, or somehow intenralizing them through endless rpeated rote practice, constructivism posits that children actually invent their ideas.
 
John Dewey (1938) focused on experience as the key element in the educational process. He saw learning as the process of "making determinate the indeterminate experience," and argued that the proper procedure for doing that was the scientific method: a sequence of perceiving a problem, articulating it, forming a hypothesis for solving it, testing the hypothesis, and checking out the consequences of our actions in the world. That, he said, is where knowledge comes from. Moreover, Dewey suggested that the meaning of any experience is an interplay between what the person brings to the situation and what happens there. Based on knowledge derived from previous experience, that is, the person works on the new experience to make sense of it.
 
Various works discuss constructivism's place in certain subject areas. Cobb's Where is the mind? Constructivist and Sociocultural Perspectives on Mathematical Development was published in Educational Researcher (Volume 27, 1994).
 
Linn, M.C. & Burbules, N. C. authored Construction of Knowledge and Group Learning: The Practice of Constructivism in Science Education (AAAS Press 1993).