Jerome Bruner

 

The American psychologist and educator, Jerome Seymore Bruner, has done extensive work with all aspects of cognition in young children. His work on perception, learning, and memory, along with the work of Jean Piaget, has significantly influenced the American education system. Bruner has been called the Father of Cognitive Psychology. From a historical perspective, his work was an act of rebellion against the current state of psychology at the time. He shifted the focus of psychologists from the behaviorist paradigm to that of the cognitive sciences (LeFrancois, 2000).   A major theme in the work of Bruner is that learning is an active process in which the learner constructs new ideas or concepts based upon his or her existing knowledge. Cognitive structure, for example, schema and mental models, provides meaning and organization to experiences and allows the individual to move beyond the given information or immediate stimuli. Cognitive processes, like thinking and believing, provide anchor to stimuli and responses so that the learner can maintain similiar responses in changing environments or offer different responses in the same environment when necessary. His constructivist theory is a general framework for instruction based upon his studies of cognition. Much of Bruner’s theory is linked to child development research, especially Piaget (LeFrancois, 2000).  Bruner proposed three systems of processing information by which people understand their world. These three ways to represent knowledge are:  Enactive representation  is the belief that young children represent the world in terms of personal action Iconic representation is the stage of development characterized by a representation of the world in terms of concrete mental images Symbolic representation is the final stage of development in which children represent their world in arbitrary symbols. This includes language and theoretical systems. These emerge in a developmental sequence. Bruner, unlike Piaget, did not argue for the age dependency of the stages of development, but that environment played a role in supporting the internal capabilities of the learner (Driscoll, 2000.) Piaget spoke of a readiness to learn, whereas Bruner asks if the material to be learned is ready for the learner. In his book, The Process of Education, Bruner (1960), contends that any subject can be taught in some intellectually honest form to any child, regardless of their maturity level.   Bruner’s theory is based on the idea that learners construct knowledge based on interacting with the environment. This belief is fundamental to the constructivist approach to education. Bruner says that we discover our own meanings and make up our own versions of reality. He argues that the function of school should be to provide conditions that will foster the discovery of relationships (Bruner, 1960).  Bruner advocates several approaches to teaching that support his ideas and research. These are:    Discovery Learning: the learning that takes place when students are not presented the subject matter in its final form, but allowed to develop, discover and organize it themselves. The Spiral Curriculum: defined by Bruner to mean a curriculum that revisits the same topics repeatedly, often at different grade levels or stages of development depending on the interest and background of the learner.

 

Links to Applications for Classroom Instruction:  Web Units and Lessons  Inquiry Models   Mixed Age Classrooms  Driscoll's Applications

 

References         Bruner, J. (1960). The process of education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.       Driscoll, M. P. (2000). Psychology of  learning for instruction-2nd edition.  Needleham Heights, Mass:  Allyn and Bacon.       LeFrancois, G.R. (2000). Psychology for teaching. University of Alberta: Wadsworth Thomson Learning.

 

Home	Learning and Development