A major theme in constructivist theory is the notion that students learn best by discovery-based interactions with complex and problematic environments that require the testing of hypotheses and the development of generalizations. This theme has obvious roots in John Dewey's learning by doing proposition that "there is an intimate and necessary relation between the processes of actual experience and education."

Jerome Bruner is generally credited with the first modern attempt to construct a theory that emphasized learner-centric discovery-oriented pedagogy over traditional communications-driven instructional models. Bruner is similar to Piaget in that he emphasized the importance of calibrating instructional content to match student ability levels, and that meaningful learning required complex and perplexing problems (disequilibration) to motivate students to ask questions, make decisions and view consequences.

Mastery of the fundamental ideas of a field involves not only the grasping of general principles, but also the development of an attitude toward learning and inquiry, toward guessing and hunches, toward the possibility of solving problems on one's own ... For if we do nothing else we should somehow give to children (students) a respect for their own powers of thinking, for their power to generate good questions, to come up with interesting informed guesses ... to make ... study more rational, more amenable to the use of mind in the large rather than memorizing. (Bruner, 1960, p.20; 1966, p. 96)

Bruner proposed that instructional experiences should be arranged in a spiral curriculum that leverages prior student experiences. Jonassen has recently extended this emphasis in a Generative Learning theory that proposes that the role of the instructor must change to that of a facilitator, whose primary responsibility is to design and implement experiences that invite student exploration and experimentation in a systematic, increasingly complex manner.

Inductive reasoning (forming generalizations based on the accretion of specific details) is an important cognitive strategy in discovery learning environments. The ability to synthesize from specific instructional instances or events general patterns of logic is critical to the discovery of conceptual interrelationships. Bruner argues that the mental activity required to detect these patterns is what facilitates the subsumption of new knowledge with old, thereby attenuating the risks of forgetting and inertia:

Emphasis on discovery in learning has precisely the effect on the learner of leading him to be a constructionist, to organize what he is encountering in a manner not only designed to discover regularity and relatedness, but also to avoid the kind of information drift that fails to keep account of the uses to which information might have to be put. (1962)

References

Bruner, J.S. (1960) The Process of Education, Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Mass.

Bruner, J.S. (1966) Toward a Theory of Instruction, Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Mass.