Jerome S. Bruner

EDCI 6900

Presented by Brian Wahl

Biography

Born 10/01/1915 in New York. At the age of 2 underwent

surgeries to correct vision impairment due to cataracts.

His father died when he was 12 and the family moved frequently.

Attended Duke University in North Carolina where he obtained a BA in 1937.

Received a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1941.

Educational Vita

Professor of Psychology at Harvard - (1952-1972)

Watts Professor at Oxford, England- (1972-1980)

New School of Social Research New York

Senior Research Fellow in Law, New York University (Current)

Research Professor of Psychology, New York University (Current)

President’s Science Advisory Committee: Kennedy and Johnson

Instrumental in the development of Head Start Program

International Balzan Prize for “lifelong contribution to the understanding of the human mind”

CIBA Gold Medal for Distinguished Research

Distinguished Scientific Award of the American Psychological Association

Wow, I’ve been pretty

busy!

Publications

The Process of Education – 1960On Knowing – 1962 The Culture of Education – 1996Acts of Meaning – 1991Actual Minds, Possible Words – 1987Towards a theory of instruction - 1966 The Relevance of Education –1971

Major Ideas

 Key Theory Learning is an active, social process in which students construct new ideas or concepts based on current knowledge. The student selects information, originates hypotheses, and makes decisions in the process of integrating experiences into their existing mental constructs.

"Learners are encouraged to discover facts and relationships for themselves."

Assumptions The outcome of cognitive development is thinking. The intelligent mind creates from experience “generic coding systems that permit one to go beyond the data to new and possibly fruitful predictions.” Children as they grow must acquire a way for representing “recurrent regularities” in their environment. Bruner believes that important outcomes of learning include not only just the concepts, categories, and problem-solving procedures invented previously in the culture, but also the ability to “invent” these things for one’s self.  

Assumptions

Cognitive growth involves an interaction between basic human capabilities and “culturally invented technologies that serve as amplifiers of the capabilities.” These culturally invented technologies include not just the obvious things such as computers and television, but also more abstract notions such as the way a culture categorizes phenomena, and language itself. Bruner would likely agree with Vygotsky that language serves to mediate between environmental stimuli and the individual’s response.

Assumptions

The outcome of cognitive development is thinking.

Cognitive growth involves an interaction between basic human capabilities and “culturally invented technologies that serve as amplifiers of the capabilities.”

Instructional TheoryFour Major Components of Instructional Theory Predisposition toward

learning Ways in which the body of

knowledge can be structured so that it may be more readily grasped by the learner

Effective sequencing in the presentation of material

The nature of pacing rewards and punishments

Instruction Design Three Principals of Instruction Design

Instruction must be concerned with the experiences and contexts that make the student willing and able to learn (readiness)

Instruction must be structured so that it can be easily grasped by the student (spiral organization)

Instruction must be designed to facilitate extrapolation and or fill in the gaps (going beyond the information given)

Modes of Representation of Intellectual Development

Bruner hypothesized that intellectual development moves through three distinct stages. However, unlike Piaget, Bruner did not confine his observations of development to age.

Enactive Stage: Knowledge is primarily stored in the form of motor responses. This is not just limited to children. Many adults can perform a variety of motor tasks such as typing, sewing, or mowing the lawn that they would have difficulty describing in iconic (picture) or symbolic (word) form.

Modes of Representation of Intellectual Development

Iconic Stage: Knowledge is stored primarily in the form of visual images. This may explain why, when we are learning a new subject, it is often helpful to have diagrams or illustrations to accompany verbal information.

Modes of Representation of Intellectual Development

Symbolic Stage: Knowledge is stored primarily as words, mathematical symbols, or into other symbol systems. Bruner’s taxonomy states that icons differ from symbols in that symbols are considered “arbitrary”

Implications for Instruction

“Any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development”.

“The subject matter must be made ready for the child” The instructional challenge is to provide problems that

fit the manner of the child’s thinking and temp him/her into more powerful modes of thinking.

The notion of enactive, iconic, and symbolic stages may also be applied to adults learning unfamiliar material

Modes of representation imply the ideal sequence for instruction, but when learners have well-developed symbolic systems, it may not be necessary to go through the entire sequenceThe notion of “spiral curriculum” embodies Bruner’s ideas by ‘spiraling” through similar topics at every age Discovery is not just an instructional tool, but an important learning outcome Educators should remember that different cultures will exhibit different kinds of reasoning and inference

Special Interests

Spiral curriculum – On Knowing 1960, similar to Vygotsky’s “scaffolding theory”.

Computational Learning and Culturalism – The Culture of Education 1996, two theories that are important and required for effective learning.

Basic Tenets of Psycho-Cultural Educational Approach – The Culture of Education 1996, nine tenets or principlesIn understanding the learning process.

Spiral Curriculum”…I was struck by the fact that successful efforts to teach highly structured bodies of knowledge like mathematics, physical sciences, and even the field of history often took the form of metaphoric spiral in which at some simple level a set of ideas or operations were introduced in a rather intuitive way and, once mastered in that spirit, were then revisited and reconstructed in a more formal or operational way, then being connected with other knowledge, the mastery at this stage then being carried one step higher to a new level of formal or operational rigour and to a broader level of abstraction and comprehensiveness. The end stage of this process was eventual mastery of the connexity and structure of a large body of knowledge”…(p.3-4).

Spiral Curriculum in the Social Studies

Computational Learning

The basic tenet of this theory is that the learner and knowledge can be equated to the function of a computer and that the organization and use of information is highly structured.

The objective of the computationalism is to devise a formal description of any and all functioning systems that manage the flow of information and produces a foreseeable, systematic outcome.

The hypothesis that the mind functions as a computer that collects, collates, and manages information.

Culturalism

The proposal that the mind is both constituted and realized by human culture.

Culturalism

The tenets of this theory state that the mind cannot exist save for culture.

Development is linked to a way of life that defines reality as represented by symbolism shared by the members of a cultural community in which a technical-social way of life is both organized and constructed in terms of that symbolism.

Computational Thinking and Culturalism

Both theories are important and required for effective learning. One must know how information is input and organized. However without the appropriate cultural symbolism, the information is without meaning and is much less likely to be remembered.

Basic Tenets of Psycho-Cultural Educational Approach

In Summary

To instruct someone….is not a matter of getting him to commit results to mind.Rather, it is to teach him to participate in the process that makes possible the establishment of knowledge. We teach a subject not to produce little living libraries on that subject, but rather to get a student to think mathematically for himself, to consider matters as an historian does, to take part in the process of knowledge-getting. Knowing is a process not a product. (1966)