The contributions of different constructivists help us to see how context, experience, play and talk with adults and children provide opportunities and support for children's cognitive development.
Major constructivists' ideas have made us aware of the ways in which young children's minds are not 'blank slates', nor primed for learning according to the behaviourists' stimulus-response theory (Nursery World, 18 March 2004), as had been assumed earlier in western societies.
Constructivists are convinced that human beings actively construct their knowledge of the worlds they inhabit - people, their ways of behaving, objects, and environments they come into contact with - out of their experiences. In other words, constructivists see knowledge not as a body of facts that are stored in and passed between human minds, but as a process.
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