BRUNER’S
CONSTRUCTIVIS
T THEORY
MARIA KATRINA MORA
MICHAELA DURAN
OBJECTIVES:
Explain the individual’s ability and
development to represent knowledge.
Differentiate and discuss the kinds of
categories of identity, equivalent and coding.
Explain how spiral curriculum works.
JEROME SEYMOUR
BRUNER
Born in October 1,1915 at New York City
He received his A.B degree from Duke University in 1937 and his Ph.
D. in 1947 from Harvard.
In 1960 he published “The Process of Education”.
Affiliations: American Psychological Association Law & Society
Association Society for Research in Child Development.
Scaffolding Theory
Spiral Curriculum
He was one of the first proponents of constructivism.
CONSTRUCTIVISM
Is an epistemological belief about
what “knowing” is and how one
“come to know”.
CONSTRUCTIVISM
reject the notions that:
Knowledge is an identifiable entity with absolute value
Meaning can be passed on to learners via symbol or
transmission
Learners can incorporate exact copies of teachers
understanding for their own use.
BRUNER’S MAJOR
THEME IN THEORETICAL
FRAMEWORK
“Learning is an active process in which
learners construct new ideas or concepts
based upon their current and past
knowledge.”
Principles of Jerome Bruner
Theory
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 should be designed to facilitate extrapolation and or fill in the gaps. (Going
beyond information given)
Bruner’s Theoretical Framework is based on the theme that learning is an active process
and learners construct new ideas or concepts based upon existing knowledge.
Principles of Jerome
Bruner
Theory
The process include selection and transformation of
information, decision making, generating hypothesis and
making meaning from information and experience.
Cognitive structure provides meaning and organization to
experiences and allows the individual to “go beyond the
information given.”
He investigated motivation for learning. He felt that ideally,
interest in the subject matter is the best stimulus for learning,
Bruner did not like external competitive goals such as grades
or class ranking.
Cognitive Development
Like Piaget, Bruner believed in stages of instruction
based on development.
Enactive (birth to age 3)
Iconic (age 3 to 8)
Symbolic (from age 8)
Each mode is dominant at different phases of
development but all are present and accessible always.
Enactive
The first stage he termed is “Enactive”,
when a person learns about the world through
actions on physical objects and the outcomes
of these actions.
Iconic
The second stage is called “Iconic”,
where learning can be obtained
through using models and pictures.
Symbolic
Symbolic in which the learner develops the
capacity to think in abstract terms.
Based on this three-stage notion, Bruner
recommended using a combination of
concrete, pictorial then symbolic activities will
lead to more effective learning.
Scaffolding Theory
He used the term to describe young children’s oral
language acquisition.
Helped by their parents when they first start learning to
speak, young children are provided with instinctive
structures to learn a language.
Bedtime stories and read-alouds are classic examples.
Spiral Curriculum
Teaching should always lead to boosting cognitive development. Students will not
understand the concept if teachers plan to teach it using only the teacher’s level of
understanding.
The task of the instructor is to translate information to be learned into a format
appropriate to the learner’s current state of understanding.
Curriculum should be organized in a spiral manner so that the student continually
builds upon what they have already learned.
In spiral curriculum, teachers must revisit the curriculum by teaching the same
content in different ways depending on the students’ developmental levels.
IN K-12 curriculum, the spiral progression is a mandate. Sec. 5 (g), Curriculum
Development of RA 10533, states “The curriculum shall use the spiral progression
approach to ensure mastery of knowledge and skills after each level.”
SPIRAL
CURRICULUM
