Jerome Bruner And The Constructivist Theory

Jerome Bruner was born in New York, New York on October 1st, 1915 to parents Herman and Rose Bruner. He attended Duke University out of high school in 1937, then moved on to Harvard University in 1941 where he received his Ph.D in 1947. He went on to serve as a social psychologist for the U.S Army intelligence during WWII. This experience caused him to become interested in how teaching works in the United States . Jerome was thus invited to a two week meeting which included many scholars and educators in 1959 at Cape Cod. This convention resulted in his 1960 book The Process of Education, which in turn became the basis for many programs and experiments during the 60 's. Afterwards he joined other committees like the President 's Advisory Panel …show more content…
He stated that a theory of instruction should include susceptibility to learning, how the information should be structured so the learner can easily understand it, an effective sequence to present the information, and how frequent rewards and punishments are given. This was known as the Constructivist Theory. Bruner thought that the way in which material is stored in a child 's memory could be broken down into three parts; En-active, Iconic, and Symbolic. En-active mode takes place from birth to age one and is action based. For example a child shaking a rattle, or an adult trying to describe something like typing, would have trouble explaining it without doing the action. Iconic takes place from ages one to six and stores information in the form of pictures. From the age 7 and up symbolic mode gets introduced and develops last. This is the language and symbols side of learning. Bruner believed that anyone could learn anything if structured appropriately. He sees babies and smart and able to solve problems from birth with the ability similar to a mature adult.
In 1961 he stated that education is not to just shove information into people but instead it is to teach a child how to think and solve problems so they can use the ability for other situations. In his book The Process of Education he made it known …show more content…
This builds a good social environment for the child and prevents them from having too much freedom and getting distracted from their difficult task at hand; also known as scaffolding. He also shares ideas in his theory with Piaget , but there 's just as many differences as there are similarities. They both agree that children are naturally curious, are per-adapted to learning, their cognitive structures grow over time, and they are active participates in the learning process. On the other hand Bruner believes that development is a continuous process while Piaget thinks its a series of stages. Also he thinks that the involvement of adults and wiser peers make a big difference, and symbolic though doesn 't replace any of the earlier modes of