| Jerome Bruner | |
|---|---|
| Born | October 1, 1915 New York, NY |
| Nationality | American |
| Fields | psychology |
| Known for | cognitive psychology educational psychology Coining the term "scaffolding" |
| Notable awards | International Balzan Prize, CIBA Gold Medal for Distinguished Research Distinguished Scientific Award of the American Psychological Association |
Jerome Seymour Bruner (born October 1, 1915) is an American psychologist who has made significant contributions to human cognitive psychology and cognitive learning theory in educational psychology, as well as to history and to the general philosophy of education. Bruner is currently a senior research fellow at the New York University School of Law. He received his B.A. in 1937 from Duke University and his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1941[1].
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Jerome Bruner was born on October 1, 1915 in New York to Polish parents, Heman and Rose Bruner. [2] He received his bachelor's degree in psychology in 1937 from Duke University. Bruner went on to earn a master's degree in psychology in 1939 and then his doctorate in psychology in 1941 from Harvard University. In 1939, Bruner published his first psychological article, studying the effect of thymus extract on the sexual behavior of the female rat.[3] During World War II, Bruner served on the Psychological Warfare Division of the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditory Force Europe committee under Eisenhower, researching social psychological phenomena. [2] Then, in 1945, Bruner returned to Harvard as a psychology professor and was heavily involved in research relating to cognitive psychology and educational psychology. In 1970, Bruner left Harvard to teach at the University of Oxford in England. He returned to the United States in 1980 to continue his research in developmental psychology. In 1991, Bruner joined the faculty at New York University, where he still teaches today. As an adjunct professor at NYU School of Law, he studies how psychology affects legal practice. Throughout his career, Bruner has been awarded honorary doctorates from Yale and Columbia, as well as colleges and universities in such locations as Sorbonne, Berlin, and Rome, and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.[4]
Bruner is one of the pioneers of the cognitive psychology movement in the United States. This began through his own research when he began to study sensation and perception as being active, rather than passive processes. In 1947, Bruner published his classic study Value and Need as Organizing Factors in Perception in which poor and rich children were asked to estimate the size of coins or wooden disks the size of American pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters and half-dollars. The results showed that the value and need the poor and rich children associated with coins caused them to significantly overestimate the size of the coins, especially when compared to their more accurate estimations of the same size disks. [5] Similarly, another classic study conducted by Bruner and Leo Postman showed slower reaction times and less accurate answers when a deck of playing cards reversed the color of the suit symbol for some cards (e.g. red spades and black hearts).[6]These series of experiments issued in what some called the 'New Look' psychology, which challenged psychologists to study not just an organism's response to a stimulus, but also its internal interpretation. [2] After these experiments on perception, Bruner turned his attention to the actual cognitions that he had indirectly studied in his perception studies. In 1956, Bruner published a book A Study of Thinking which formerly initiated the study of cognitive psychology. Then, in 1956, Bruner help found the Center of Cognitive Studies at Harvard. After a time, Bruner began to do research on other topics in psychology, but in 1990 he returned to the subject and gave a series of lectures. The lectures were complied into a book Acts of Meaning and in these lectures, Bruner refuted the computer model for studying the mind, advocating a more holistic understanding of the mind and its cognitions.
Beginning around 1967, Bruner turned his attention toward the subject of developmental psychology. Bruner studied how children learned and coined the term "scaffolding" to describe how children often build off the information they have already mastered. In his research on the development of children (1966), Bruner proposed three modes of representation: enactive representation (action-based), iconic representation (image-based), and symbolic representation (language-based). Rather than neatly delineated stages, the modes of representation are integrated and only loosely sequential as they "translate" into each other. Symbolic representation remains the ultimate mode, for it "is clearly the most mysterious of the three." Bruner's theory suggests it is efficacious when faced with new material to follow a progression from enactive to iconic to symbolic representation; this holds true even for adult learners. A true instructional designer, Bruner's work also suggests that a learner (even of a very young age) is capable of learning any material so long as the instruction is organized appropriately, in sharp contrast to the beliefs of Piaget and other stage theorists. (Driscoll, Marcy). Like Bloom's Taxonomy, Bruner suggests a system of coding in which people form a hierarchical arrangement of related categories. Each successively higher level of categories becomes more specific, echoing Benjamin Bloom's understanding of knowledge acquisition as well as the related idea of instructional scaffolding. In accordance with this understanding of learning, Bruner proposed the spiral curriculum, a teaching approach in which each subject or skill area is revisited at intervals, at a more sophisticated level each time.
While Bruner was at Harvard he published a series of works about his assessment of current educational systems and ways that education could be improved. In 1961, he published the book Process of Education. Bruner also served as a member of the Educational Panel of the President's Science Advisory Committee during the presidencies of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Referencing his overall view that education should not focus merely on the memorization of facts, Bruner wrote in Process of Education that 'knowing how something is put together is worth a thousand facts about it.' From 1964-1996, Bruner sought to develop a complete curriculum for the educational system that would meet the needs of students in three main areas which he called Man; A Course of Study. Bruner wanted to create an educational environment that would focus on (1) what was uniquely human about human beings, (2) how humans got that way and (3) how humans could become more so. [3] In 1966, Bruner published another book relevant to education, Towards a Theory of Instruction, and then in 1973, another book, The Relevance of Education was published. Finally, in 1996, Bruner wrote another book, The Culture of Education, reassessing the state of educational practices three decades after he had begun his educational research. Bruner was also credited with helping found the early childcare program Head Start. [7]
In 1991, Bruner arrived at NYU as a visiting professor to do research and to found the Colloquium on the Theory of Legal Practice. The goal of this institution is to "study how law is practiced and how its practice can be understood by using tools developed in anthropology, psychology, linguistics, and literary theory."[8] Currently Bruner is Senior Research Fellow in Law at NYU. [4]