II. 4. Practice

1. Outline the most important aspects of constructivist learning theory.

Sample key:

Constructivism says that people construct their own knowledge through actively experiencing things.  All knowledge has been construed by us, we are active creators of our own knowledge.  It is due to their social relations that people build up their inner world in themselves. What we know is not identical with the real world and it is not a mirror-image of it either. It is our personal interpretation, our model of the world.

The basic principle of constructivism is that our knowledge does not derive from an external source and does not use a mediatory mechanism, but it is construed by ourselves. Our prior knowledge, which is a system of the mind, plays a significant role in this process.