Children construct theories or hypothesis about learning situations by putting things into relationships. By using this process of constantly putting formerly learned relationships into new relationships, they become aware of their circular reasoning and construct meaningful explanations of phenomena. Constructivists would not think that children absorb ideas that are spoken to them by teachers or that they somehow internalize them through endless repeated practice, constructivists argue that children actually invent their ideas. They assimilate new information to simple, pre-existing notions and modify their understanding according to the new data. During this process, the ideas of children grow in complexity and power so that with support, children develop critical insight into how they think and what they know about the world grows in depth and detail.
Constructivism looks carefully at how children create and develop their ideas.
Children become aware of the substantive content of objects if they attend to the principles of construction of the features. That is, through interacting with and manipulating objects, subjects come to know the principles that organize the object's properties. Number is not something with an independent objective existence with which children have a particular concept. The study of number is the study of something in evolution or something in the process of construction. The constructivist asserts that children don't conceive number, rather they construct it.