Jerome S.

Bruner

•COGNITIVE PERSPECTIVE OF
LEARNING DEVELOPMENT
 Jerome S. Bruner
At the age of 2
underwent surgeries
Born 10-01-1915 in
to correct vision
New York.
impairment due to
cataracts.

Attended Duke
University in North Received a Ph.D. from
Carolina where he Harvard in 1941.
obtained a BA in 1937.

Jerome S. Bruner is
considered as the
advocate of learning by
discovery.
According to Bruner the outcome of
cognitive development is thinking.

According to Bruner (1960), effective learning occurs when

students acquire a general understanding of a subject; that,
when they understand the structure of a subject, they see it as
a related whole. According to Bruner, mind organises
knowledge in a hierarchical fashion, with the more general, all
encompassing ideas at the top of hierarchy, and the more
concrete, factorial ideas toward the bottom.

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.
According to Bruner, one’s intellectual
ability evolves as a result of
maturation, training and
experiences through a series of three
sequential stages –the
enactive ,iconic and symbolic.
•Enactive Stage
• Knowledge is primarily
stored in the form of motor
responses. This is not just
limited to children. A baby
represents world through
actions - Our knowledge for
motor skills (eg riding a
bike) are represented in the
enactive mode. They
become automatic through
repetition
• Many adults can perform a
variety of motor tasks such
as typing, sewing etc.
• Sometimes called the
concrete stage, this first
stage involves a tangible
hands-on method of
learning.
• Bruner believed that "learning
begins with an action -
touching, feeling, and
manipulating" (Brahier, 2009, p.
52).
• In science education,
manipulatives are the
concrete objects with which
the actions are performed.
• Common examples of
manipulatives used in this
stage in science education are
leaves, plants, water,
plasticine, straws (anything
tangible)
•Iconic Stage
• Knowledge is stored
primarily in the form
of visual images.
knowledge
represented through
visual or auditory
images – icons. This
may explain why,
when we are learning
a new subject, it is
often helpful to have
diagrams or
illustrations to
accompany verbal
information.
• Sometimes called
the pictorial stage,
this second stage
involves images or
other visuals to
represent the
concrete situation
enacted in the first
stage.
• One way of doing this is
to simply draw images
of the objects on paper
or to picture them in
one's head.
• Other ways could be
through the use of
shapes, diagrams, and
graphs.
•Symbolic Stage
• Knowledge is stored primarily as words, mathematical
symbols, or into other symbol systems. major change at 6/7
yrs – language starts to influence thought. Not so
dominated by appearance of things children can think
beyond images and use symbols such as words or numbers.
• Sometimes called the abstract stage, the last stage takes the images from the second
stage and represents them using words and symbols.
• The use of words and symbols "allows a student to organize information in the mind by
relating concepts together" (Brahier, 2009, p. 53).
• The words and symbols are abstractions, they do not necessarily have a direct
connection to the information.
• For example, a number is a symbol used to describe how many of something there are,
but the number in itself has little meaning without the understanding of it means for
there to be that number of something.
• Other examples would be Chemical symbols (H2O) or circuit symbols
• Finally, language and words are another way to abstractly represent the idea. In the
context of science, this could be the use of words such as current, force, growth, MRS
NERG, material etc…
 Children’s stages of development
Enactive Stage Iconic Stage Symbolic Stage
(from birth to about age 3)
(from about age 3 to about (from about age 8)
age 8)
Children perceive the Chidren use symbols
environment through to represent people
actions they initiate. Children remember and and things since they
They describe and use information through can think and talk in
explain objects in terms imagery. abstract terms.
of what a child can do Their visual memory they can identify
with them. increases and they think “defined” concepts.
about actions without
experiencing them.
Their decisions based on
perception
BASES OF BRUNER'S THEORY OF COGNITIVE GROWTH
• Bruner believes that cognitive development takes into account the following
points.

INDEPENDENCE OF RESPONSE FROM STIMULUS

• Intellectual growth in children is influenced by increasing independence of
responses from stimulus. In sensory-motor stage, the responses of children are
mainly governed by various stimuli. As children grow and acquire language
ability, they respond to different situations independent of the presence of
stimuli.

MENTAL REPRESENTATIONS
• Children develop mental representations of the outside reality through internal
information processing and storage system. These mental representations may
be verbal, visual, mathematical or musical. Language helps a child form mental
representations of the realities outside.

SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS
• Intellectual development involves an increasing capacity to say to ourselves and
others, in words or with symbols, what we have done and what we will do. This
point deals with self consciousness. (Gage and Berliner, 1984).
TUTOR-
LEARNER Cognitive growth, according to Bruner, depends on
INTERACTIONS constant interactions between tutor and learners. A
tutor can be teacher, mother, father, friend or any
other person who can teach a child.

LANGUAGE AS
THE KEY Language is a key symbol, which plays an important
role in cognitive development. It helps a child to
communicate her conceptions of the world. It
mediates various events occurring in the world.

SIMULTANEITY
IN COGNITION Cognitive growth in children is characterized by
their ability to engage in simultaneous cognition.
They can perform concurrent activities and pay
attention to various learning situations.
 What ideas and influences are
associated with Bruner?

• Constructivism
• paradigm of learning
• learners create their own
subjective constructs of
reality
• Discovery learning
• method of instruction
• learning is best achieved through a
process of inquiry
Discovering learning

Teacher plans and arranges activities in such a way

that students search, manipulate, explore, and
investigate.

Most discovery does not happen by chance.

Students require background preparation. Once
students possess prerequisite knowledge careful
structuring of material allows them to discover
important principles.

This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under

CC BY
A brief Cartoon Story

This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-SA

Spiral
Curriculum
• Bruner introduced the doctrine of
the spiral curriculum, that all topics
-in some form -must be introduced
at an early age, but cannot be
exhausted at any age, and thus must
be returned to in increasing depth.
• In order for a student to develop
from simple to more complex
lessons, certain basic knowledge
and skills must first be mastered.
This provides linkages between
each lesson as student spirals
upwards in a course of a study.
• As new knowledge and skills are
introduced, they reinforce what is
already learned and become
related to previously learned
information.
Indicators of cognitive
development
Respond Respond to situations in varied ways.
Internalize the events into
Internalize a storage system (that
corresponds to the environment).
Have Have increased capacity for language.

Interact Interact systematically with the tutor.

Use language as an
Use instrumentfor ordering the environment.

Have increasing capacity to deal

Have with multiple demands.
Bruner (1996) states that a theory of
instruction should address four major aspects

Predisposition to learn.
• He introduced the ideas of “readiness for
learning”. Instruction must be concerned
with the experiences and context that make
the student willing and able to learn.
Structure of Learning
• Instruction must be structured so that it can
be easily grasped by the students. The
ways in which a body of knowledge can be
structured so that it can be most readily
grasped by the leaner.
Effective Sequencing
• Instruction should be designed to facilitate
extrapolation and or fill in the gaps. No one
sequencing will fit every learner, but in
general, the lesson can be presented in
increasng difficulty.
Reinforcement
• Rewards and punishment should be
selected and paced appropriately.
Key Points
Skills learned they become
Development involves
automatic and become units
mastery of increasingly more
that can be combined to
complex modes of thinking
build up a new set of skilled
from Enactive to Symbolic
behaviours

Stresses role of language &

Learning not a gradual
interpersonal
process
communication.

Instructionis an essential
part of
Emphasizes need for active
learning
involvement by experts.
process in natural and
educational settings