One of the most visible approaches to peer learning comes out of cognitive psychology, and is applied within a "mainstream" educational framework: "Peer learning is an educational practice in which students interact with other students to attain educational goals." Other authors including David Boud describe peer learning as a way of moving beyond independent to interdependent or mutual learning among peers. In this context, it can be compared to the practices that go by the name cooperative learning. However, other contemporary views on peer learning relax the constraints, and position "peer-to-peer learning" as a mode of "learning for everyone, by everyone, about almost anything." Whether it takes place in a formal or informal learning context, in small groups or online, peer learning manifests aspects of self-organization that are mostly absent from pedagogical models of teaching and learning.

In his 1916 book, Democracy and Education, John Dewey wrote, "Education is not an affair of 'telling' and being told, but an active and constructive process." In a later essay, entitled "Experience and Education", Dewey went into greater detail about the science of child development and developed the basic Constructivist theory that knowledge is created through experience, rather than passed down from teacher to student through rote memorization. Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky, who developed the concept of the Zone of Proximal Development, was another proponent of constructivist learning: his book, Thought and Language, provides evidence that students learn better through collaborative, meaningful problem-solving activities than through solo exercises.

The three distinguishing features of constructivist theory are claims that:

These are clearly meaningful propositions in a social context with sustained relationships, where people work on projects or tasks that are collaborative or otherwise shared.

Educational Psychology Professor Alison King explains in "Promoting Thinking Through Peer Learning" that peer learning exercises as simple as having students explain concepts to one another are proof of social constructivism theory at work; the act of teaching another individual demands that students "clarify, elaborate on, and otherwise reconceptualize material." Joss Winn, Senior Lecturer in Educational Research at University of Lincoln, proposes that schools radically redefine the teacher-student relationship to fit this constructivist theory of knowledge in his December 2011 paper, "Student as Producer". Carl Rogers' "Personal Thoughts on Learning" focus on the individual's experience of effective learning, and eventually conclude that nearly the entire traditional educational structure is at odds with this experience. Self-discovered learning in a group that designates a facilitator is the "new approach" Rogers recommends for education.

In general, peer learning may adapt constructivist or discovery learning methods for the peer-to-peer context: however, peer learning typically manifests constructivist ideas in a more informal way, when learning and collaboration are simply applied to solve some real shared problem.

Paulo Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed advocated a more equitable relationship between teachers and students, one in which information is questioned and situated in political context, and all participants in the classroom work together to create knowledge. Paulo Blikstein, Assistant Professor of Education at Stanford University wrote in Travels in Troy with Freire: Technology as an Agent of Emancipation that through exploratory building activities, "Not only did students become more autonomous and responsible, they learned to teach one another."

Yochai Benkler explains how the now-ubiquitous computer helps us produce and process knowledge together with others in his book, The Wealth of Networks. George Siemens argues in Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age, that technology has changed the way we learn, explaining how it tends to complicate or expose the limitations of the learning theories of the past. In practice, the ideas of connectivism developed in and alongside the then-new social formation, "massive open online courses" or MOOCs.