Constructivism refers to the idea that individuals actively create meaning by structuring and restructuring experience through self-regulated mental activity. Recently, this position has been criticized from the standpoints of diametrically opposed theoretical frameworks. On the one hand, nativists maintain that basic mental structures are inherited rather than constructed by individuals; on the other hand, sociocultural psychologists argue that meaning is a product of social and cultural activity. The present article presents an epigenetic systems approach to human development. This view conceptualizes individual action and meaning as the emergent products of coactions among multiple levels of a hierarchically organized organism-environment system. The epigenetic view provides a framework for analyzing the role of biogenetic and sociocultural processes in human development, but in a way that maintains the idea that the person functions as an active constructor in the process of development.

Constructivism is the philosophical and scientific position that knowledge arises through a process of active construction. From this view, knowledge structures are neither innate properties of the mind nor are they passively transmitted to individuals by experience. In this entry, we outline recent advances in constructivist models of cognitive development, beginning by analyzing the origins of constructivist developmental theory in the seminal writings of Piaget. We then examine the ways in which theoretical and empirical challenges to his theory have resulted in the elaboration of a more powerful constructivism in the form of neoPiagetian and systems models of human development.