Jerome Bruner Was a psychologist known for his important contributions in the field of cognitive psychology and learning theories.
He spent much of his life devoted to psychological research, focused on discovering how the human mind thinks, as well as being a prominent professor of important universities in the United States as well as in England.
Early life and main contributions of Jerome Bruner
Of Polish origin, he came to the world on October 1, 1915. Bruner was born blind and could not see until he had two cataract surgeries at two years, being able to recover some vision, albeit to a limited extent.
His father was a watchmaker and died when he was only 12 years old. However, before his death, the father sold his business to leave his family in a good economic position. He also made sure to create a college fund for his son to study. At age 16, Brune agreed to Duke University, fulfilling the wishes of his late father.
Jerome was a key figure in the study of psychology beyond Behavioral theories , Which held that people tended to act rationally and according to well-defined rewards and punishments. During his 70-year career, Dr. Bruner was a tireless researcher who was constantly moving from one field to another.
He spent most of his life trying to understand the way in which the human mind perceives the world, which led him to make important contributions to the field of education and Cognitive psychology .
One of Dr. Bruner's earliest discoveries led to what became known as the New Look theory, a postulate about perception. The researcher showed that people's perceptions about objects and events are often influenced by unseen social and cultural conditions.
In one of his most famous experiments he determined that poor children had a very different perception of the size of the currencies than rich children. For them, the greater the monetary value of the currency, the larger they imagined it.
That study helped Dr. Bruner to conclude that human motivations were more complex than previously assumed and that they were subject to emotions, imagination, and cultural training.
Two of his early books, A Study of Thinking (1956) and T He Process of Education (1960), emphasized their ideas and codified them into a system that could be used in teaching.
The beginning of his career
Bruner began his prominent career at Duke's prestigious private university in North Carolina where he graduated as a psychologist in 1937. He then continued his post-graduate studies at Harvard University. In 1939 he obtained his master's degree and in 1941 his doctorate.
During World War II, Bruner joined the military and served in a job in military intelligence, where he used his training to analyze propaganda. At the end of the war, he joined the faculty of Harvard University, where he worked until 1972, and later taught at the University of Oxford, England.
At the beginning of his work as a professor and researcher at Harvard, the field of psychology was completely divided between the study of perception and the analysis of learning. In the first case there was talk of a mental and subjective process, and in the second case a behavioral and objective.
Changing the vision of what was believed at that time was not easy. The Harvard psychology department was dominated by behaviorists, who ran the research program called psychophysics.
Bruner disagreed with that approach and was revealed against it. And so, the result of his collaborative work with Leo Postman would be born the New Look, the basic theory of perception, whose postulate is based on the fact that needs and values are what determine human perceptions.
According to this theory, perception is not something that occurs immediately, but is a form of information processing that involves other elements such as interpretation and selection. Both Bruner and Postman argued that psychology had to worry about two things: how people look and interpret the world and how they respond to stimuli.
The researcher's interest in this subject led him to move from the study of perception to cognition, to understand how people think. From this concern was born one of his most important publications, A study of thinking (1956), written with Jacqueline Goodnow and George Austin.
In this article the researchers explored the way people think and how they group things into classes and categories.
Bruner discovered that during the grouping process, notions of procedures and criteria are always involved. He also determined that for this classification to be given, people focus on an indicator that is taken as a basis, from that point on grouping things, something that is done according to the capacity of memory and attention that each person has .
It was for this reason that this work was considered as the starting point of the cognitive sciences.
Learning by discovery
Bruner's interest in Field of evolutionary psychology And social psychology led him to open the Center for Cognitive Studies at Harvard with George Miller in 1960. The researcher was focused on studying how people developed their conceptual models and how they coded information about these models.
Both Bruner and Miller thought that psychology should take care of the ways in which human beings gain, store, and work with knowledge, that is, everything related to cognitive processes.
It was important for him to bring about changes in teaching that allowed him to overcome the old models of behaviorists, who viewed students as mere passive recipients of knowledge.
In their model, students play another role. They are motivated to discover the facts for themselves and build their knowledge from what they already know.
It was on the basis of this idea that Jerome Bruner developed in 1960 the learning by heuristic discovery or learning, a constructivist theory.
This theory is based on the fact that the information received from the environment goes through a complex process in the mind of the individual. In addition, as the main characteristic, there is the promotion that the learner acquires the knowledge for himself.
This theory, as a form of learning, gave a twist to the way education is understood. Unlike the Traditional educational models , With this system it is proposed that the contents to be taught should not be shown in their final form, but should be gradually discovered by the students.
For Bruner, individuals are active beings dedicated to the construction of their world. Therefore, the aim of this method is to make people actively participate in the learning process, so that they stop being passive subjects and can solve problems for themselves.
Therefore, the work of the teacher should be rather a kind of guide that provides the appropriate material to stimulate the students, either through comparisons, strategies of observation, analysis, etc.
The material provided is what Bruner called scaffolding, which is one of the most influential terms in his theory. For the psychologist and also a pedagogue, scaffolding consists of the guidance and support that is provided to students so that they can develop the different skills, knowledge and attitudes they need to face the challenges of life.
But these scaffolds are not eternal. According to the theory, once the students have developed certain capacities, these supports will be removed and then added that will lead to more complex learning. Such as a ladder on the rise.
Jerome Bruner's Three Learning Models
According to Bruner, learning by discovery is the best method to stimulate both symbolic thinking and creativity Of the individual. In his theory the researcher distinguishes three systems of information processing, with which the students are able to transform the information that they obtain to construct models of the reality.
Bruner points out that the intellectual development of a person has a sequence with general characteristics. These are two processes related to categorization. One of them is the Concept Formation, which is the process of learning the different concepts.
This happens from the 0 to the 14 years, since it has to see are the capacities to assimilate stimuli and the data that the environment offers.
After this age, the mind begins to develop and actions no longer depend only on the environment but also on the thoughts. This process is the Concept Attainment, which is the identification of the properties that determine a category.
In studying the ways in which people learn in their earliest years, Bruner establishes three basic modes in which reality is represented. These are, basically, the three ways in which we learn based on our experiences. We then speak of the enactive model (action), the iconic model (mental images) and the symbolic model (language).
The first model, the enactivo, is based on the representation of things through the immediate reaction of the person. This is the model that is used frequently during the first years of life.
In this way, learning is done by doing things, imitating and manipulating objects. But it is not a model that only children use. Adults also often use it when they try to learn complex psychomotor tasks, for example.
In the iconic model, learning is a representation of things with the use of images or drawings. In this case this representation has a similarity with the represented thing, reason why the choice of the image is not unfair or arbitrary.
It is used to teach concepts and principles that are not easily demonstrable and therefore must provide drawings and diagrams that help create the right images in the mind.
And the third model, the symbolic, is represented by language, whether oral or written. In this mode the representation of something is done by an arbitrary symbol.
Unlike the iconic representation, in this case its form has no relation to the represented thing. An example of this is the numbers. The number four could be represented iconic by four balls. In the case of symbolic representation, only 4 is necessary.
Towards the end of his career
In 1972, the Center for Cognitive Studies was closed. Bruner moved to England where he worked at Oxford University. It was here that the researcher focused on the study of cognitive development in early childhood.
By 1980 he returned to the United States and in 1981 began teaching at the New School in New York and later joined the faculty of New York University.
The researcher's contributions did not go unnoticed. He was the recipient of important awards such as the CIBA Gold Medal, which he received in 1974 or the Balzan Prize for his work in search of understanding the human mind.
However, the publication of its Mental reality and possible worlds (1986), where he showed his own focus on some topics of anthropology and literature, was one of the most relevant points of his career.
That same year also contributed to the creation of the educational cassette, Baby Talk, where he talks about the processes through which the child acquires his linguistic abilities.
And by 1990 he published a series of lectures, refuting the approach of digital processing to the study of the human mind and emphasized once again the cultural and environmental aspects of the cognitive response.
Some of his most recognized works in Spanish are Towards a theory of instruction (1972), Action, thought and language (1984), The child's speech (1986), The importance of education (1987), Acts of meaning (1991), Education, culture door (1997), and The Story Factory .