A theory, first proposed in the late 1960s, which posits that children learn through a process of interactions with their environments and their caregivers.

In the early 1960s, researchers who had become disillusioned with the radical behaviorism of theorists like B.F. Skinner began to look for theories that would explain the process of learning without relying on the behaviorist model. That model, pioneered by John Watson, Ivan Pavlov, and Skinner, was developed by studying the effects of conditioning on animals. With the cognitive revolution of the late 1950s, however, researchers began to acknowledge the faults of such an approach to studying human learning. The difference being, of course, that when dealing with human children, "instructors" are dealing with an organism whose capacity to think is equal to their own. That is, radical behaviorism fails in application to humans because children are not, as...