Jerome Bruner

Jerome Bruner
Jerome Bruner
Born

Jerome Seymour Bruner

October 1, 1915
New York, NY

Nationality

American

Fields

psychology

Knownfor

Contributions to cognitive psychology and 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 a 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 a B.A. in 1937 from Duke University and a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1941.

Biography
Jerome Bruner was born on October 1, 1915 in New York, to Heman and Rose Bruner, who emigrated from Poland.
He received a 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 a 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. 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.
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 students 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.

Cognitive psychology
Main article: Cognitive psychology
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. 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

Jerome Bruner
for some cards (e.g. red spades and black hearts).[1]
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. 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 formally initiated the study of cognitive psychology.
Soon afterwards, Bruner helped found the Center of Cognitive Studies at Harvard. After a time, Bruner began to
research other topics in psychology, but in 1990 he returned to the subject and gave a series of lectures. The lectures
were compiled 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.

Developmental psychology
Main article: Developmental psychology
Beginning around 1967, Bruner turned his attention toward the subject of developmental psychology. Bruner studied
the way children learned and coined the term "scaffolding", to describe the way children often build on 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. Bruner's spiral
curriculum draws heavily from evolution to explain how to learn better and thus it drew criticism from
conservatives. First there is basic knowledge of a subject, then more sophistication is added, reinforcing the same
principles that were first discussed. This system is used in China. In the United States classes are split by gradelife
sciences in 9th grade, chemistry in 10th, physics in 11th. The spiral teaches life sciences, chem, physics all in one
year, then two subjects, then one, then all three again to understand how they mold together.
Bruner also believes learning should be spurred by interest in the material rather than tests or punishment, since we
learn best when we find the knowledge we're obtaining appealing.

Educational psychology
Main article: Educational psychology
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

Jerome Bruner
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. 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. Bruner was deeply impressed by his 1995 visit to the
preschools of Reggio Emilia and has established a collaborative relationship with them to improve educational
systems internationally. Equally important was the relationship with the Italian Ministry of Education who officially
recognized the value of this innovative experience.

Language development
Main article: Language development
In 1972 Bruner was appointed Watts Professor of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford, where he
remained until 1980. In his Oxford years, Bruner focused on early language development. Rejecting the nativist
account of language acquisition proposed by Noam Chomsky, Bruner offered an alternative in the form of an
interactionist or social interactionist theory of language development. In this approach, the social and interpersonal
nature of language was emphasized, appealing to the work of philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, John L.
Austin and John Searle for theoretical grounding. Following Lev Vygotsky the Russian theoretician of socio-cultural
development, Bruner proposed that social interaction plays a fundamental role in the development of cognition in
general and language in particular. He emphasized that children learn language in order to communicate, and, at the
same time, they also learn the linguistic code. Meaningful language is acquired in the context of meaningful
parent-infant interaction, learning scaffolded or supported by the childs Language Acquisition Support System
(LASS).
In Oxford, Bruner collected a large group of graduate students and post-doctoral fellows who participated in the
effort to understand how young children manage to crack the linguistic code, among them Alison Garton, Alison
Gopnik, Magda Kalmar hu:Kalmr Magda (pszicholgus), Alan Leslie, Andrew Meltzoff, Anat Ninio, Roy Pea,
Susan Sugarman [2], Michael Scaife, Marian Sigman [3], Kathy Sylva and many others. Much emphasis was placed
on employing the then-revolutionary method of videotaped home-observations, Bruner showing the way to a new
wave of researchers to get out of the laboratory and take on the complexities of naturally occurring events in a childs
life. This work was published in a large number of journal articles, and in 1983 Bruner published a summary of them
in the book Childs talk: Learning to Use Language.
This decade of research firmly established Bruner at the helm of the interactionist approach to language
development, exploring such themes as the acquisition of communicative intents and the development of their
linguistic expression; the interactive context of language use in early childhood; and the role of parental input and
scaffolding behavior in the acquisition of linguistic forms. This work rests on the assumptions of a social
constructivist theory of meaning according to which meaningful participation in the social life of a group as well as
meaningful use of language involve an interpersonal, intersubjective, collaborative process of creating shared
meaning. The elucidation of this process became the focus of Bruners next period of work.

Jerome Bruner

Narrative construction of reality

In 1980 Bruner returned to the United States, taking up the position of professor at the New School for Social
Research in New York City in 1981. For the next decade, he worked on the development of a theory of the narrative
construction of reality, his work culminating in several seminal publications. His book Actual Minds, Possible
Worlds has been cited by over 16,100 scholarly publications, making it one of the most influential works of the 20th
century.

Legal psychology
Main article: Legal psychology
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." Currently Bruner is Senior
Research Fellow in Law at NYU.

Published works
Books

A Study of Thinking (1956)

The Process of Education [4] (1960)
Toward a Theory of Instruction [5] (1966)
Studies in Cognitive Growth (1966)
Processes of Cognitive Growth: Infancy (1968)
Beyond the Information Given, W. W. Norton & Company [6](1973)
On Knowing: Essays for the Left Hand [7] (1979)
Child's Talk: Learning to Use Language (1983)
In Search of Mind: Essays in Autobiography (1983)
Actual Minds, Possible Worlds [8] (1985)
The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Little Book about a Vast Memory [9] [Foreword only] 1987)
Acts of Meaning [10] (1990)
The Culture of Education [11] (1996)
Minding the Law [12] (2000)
Making Stories: Law, Literature, Life [13] (2003)

Articles
Bruner, J. S. & Goodman, C. C. (1947). Value and need as organizing factors in perception. Journal of Abnormal
and Social Psychology, 42, 33-44. Available online at the Classics in the History of Psychology archive [14].
Bruner, J. S. & Postman, L. (1947). Tension and tension-release as organizing factors in perception. Journal of
Personality, 15, 300-308.
Bruner, J. S. & Postman, L. (1949). On the perception of incongruity: A paradigm. Journal of Personality, 18,
206-223. Available online at the Classics in the History of Psychology archive. [15]
Bruner, J. S. (1975). The ontogenesis of speech acts. Journal of Child Language, 2, 1-19. (The most cited article
ever in the Journal of Child Language)
Scaife, M., Bruner, J. S. (1975). Capacity for joint visual attention in the infant. Nature, 253, 265-266.
Bruner, J. S. (1975/76). From communication to language: A psychological perspective. Cognition, 3, 255-287.

Jerome Bruner
Bruner, J. S. (1976). Prelinguistic prerequisites of speech. In R. Campbell and P. Smith (Eds.), Recent Advances
in the Psychology of Language, 4a, 199-214. New York: Plenum Press.
Bruner, J. S., and Sherwood, V. (1976). Early rule structure: The case of peekaboo. In J. S. Bruner, A. Jolly, and
K. Sylva (Eds.), Play: Its Role in Evolution and Development. London: Penguin Books.
Wood, D., Bruner, J., & Ross, G. (1976). The role of tutoring in problem solving. Journal of Child Psychology
and Psychiatry and Allied Disciplines, 17, 89-100. (Addresses the concept of instructional scaffolding.)
Bruner, J. S. (1977). Early social interaction and language acquisition. In H.R. Schaffer (Ed.), Studies in
Mother-infant Interaction (pp.271289). London: Academic Press.
Bruner, J. S., Caudill, E. and Ninio, A. (1977). Language and experience. In R. S. Peters (Ed.), John Dewey
Reconsidered. Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Ninio, A. and Bruner, J. S. (1978). The achievement and antecedents of labelling. Journal of Child Language, 5,
1-15. Reprinted in M. B. Franklin and S. S. Barten (eds.), Child Language: A Reader (pp.3649). New York:
Oxford University Press (1988). (The second most cited article ever in the Journal of Child Language)
Ratner, N. and Bruner, J. S. (1978). Games, social exchange and the acquisition of language. Journal of Child
Language, 5, 391-401.
Bruner, J. S. (1978). On prelinguistic prerequisites of speech. In R. N. Campbell and P. T. Smith, (eds.), Recent
Advances in the Psychology of Language (Vol. 4a. pp.194214). New York: Plenum Press.
Bruner, J. S. (1978). Learning how to do things with words. In J. S. Bruner and R. A. Garton, (eds), Human
Growth and Development (pp.6284). Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Bruner, J. S. (1978). The role of dialogue in language acquisition. In A. Sinclair, R.J. Jarvella, and W. J. M.
Levelt (Eds.), The Childs Conception of Language (pp.241256). New York: Springer-Verlag.
Bruner, J. S., Roy, C., and Ratner, N. (1982). The beginnings of request. In K. E. Nelson, (Ed.), Children's
Language (Vol. 3. pp.91138). Hillsdale, N.J: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Bruner, J. S. (1983). The acquisition of pragmatic commitments. In R. Golinkoff, (Ed.), The Transition from
Prelinguistic to Linguistic Communication (pp.27 42). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Bruner, J. (1995). From joint attention to the meeting of minds. In C. Moore & P. Dunham (eds.), Joint Attention:
Its Origins And Role In Development. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum.
"The Narrative Construction of Reality" (1991). Critical Inquiry, 18:1, 1-21.
"The Autobiographical Process" (1995). Current Sociology. 43.2, 161-177.
Shore, Bradd. (1997). Keeping the Conversation Going. Ethos, 25:1, 7-62. Available online at JSTOR. [16]
Mattingly, C., Lutkehaus, N. C. & Throop, C. J. (2008). Bruner's Search for Meaning: A Conversation between
Psychology and Anthropology. Ethos, 36, 1-28. [17]

References
[1] "On the Perception of Incongruity: A Paradigm" by Jerome S. Bruner and Leo Postman. Journal of Personality, 18, pp. 206-223. 1949. (http:/
/ psychclassics. yorku. ca/ Bruner/ Cards/ )
[2] http:/ / psych. princeton. edu/ psychology/ research/ sugarman/ cv. php
[3] http:/ / portal. ctrl. ucla. edu/ npi/ institution/ personnel?personnel_id=9737
[4] http:/ / www. hup. harvard. edu/ catalog. php?isbn=9780674710016
[5] http:/ / www. hup. harvard. edu/ catalog. php?isbn=9780674897014
[6] http:/ / www. amazon. com/ Beyond-Information-Given-Studies-Psychology/ dp/ 0393093638/ ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8& qid=1352554895&
sr=8-1& keywords=Bruner+ Beyond+ the+ information
[7] http:/ / www. hup. harvard. edu/ catalog. php?isbn=9780674635258
[8] http:/ / www. hup. harvard. edu/ catalog. php?isbn=9780674003668
[9] http:/ / www. hup. harvard. edu/ catalog. php?isbn=9780674576223
[10] http:/ / www. hup. harvard. edu/ catalog. php?isbn=9780674003613
[11] http:/ / www. hup. harvard. edu/ catalog. php?isbn=9780674179530
[12] http:/ / www. hup. harvard. edu/ catalog. php?isbn=9780674008168
[13] http:/ / www. hup. harvard. edu/ catalog. php?isbn=9780674010994
[14] http:/ / psychclassics. yorku. ca/ Bruner/ Value/

Jerome Bruner
[15] http:/ / psychclassics. yorku. ca/ Bruner/ Cards/
[16] http:/ / www. jstor. org/ pss/ 640457/
[17] http:/ / www. ncbi. nlm. nih. gov/ pmc/ articles/ PMC2919784/

External links
Official website (http://www.psych.nyu.edu/bruner)
Video interview (http://insidetheacademy.asu.edu/jerome-jerry-bruner)
50th anniversary event of Bruner's The Process of Education. April 27, 2011 (http://www.law.nyu.edu/news/
BRUNER_ANNIVERSARY_EVENT). Bruner's talk at 1:54:00 (https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=6t9DTKW4kvw#t=7072) on YouTube
Bruner in Inside the Psychologist's Studio (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxn6IpAJEz8) on YouTube
(interview March 2, 2013)

Article Sources and Contributors

Article Sources and Contributors

Jerome Bruner Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=616630286 Contributors: A412, AI, Acctorp, Alansohn, All Hallow's Wraith, Altg20April2nd, Amikake3, Amyposey,
Andycjp, Annarean7, Ardonik, Arno Matthias, Avoided, BD2412, Beland, Bender235, Biglovinb, Billydagoat, Blue bear sd, Broompower960, Caegb, Camilamg, Canadian Paul, Cgingold,
Chandrakirti, Charles Matthews, Chell Hill, Christian.B, Ckatz, Clicketyclack, Cncs wikipedia, D6, DVdm, Darkwind, Dduck, DennisDaniels, Diego Moya, Doczilla, Dthomsen8, Earcanal,
Eddau, Edunoramus, Edward321, Ejmasi, Emily.pellarin, Epbr123, Eransgran, EricEnfermero, Evabures, Evacarlstrom, Evil Monkey, FF2010, Fatmarauder, Filippowiki,
Fondazionebalzanpremio, Fortdj33, Forward Unto Dawn, Fratrep, Fred114, FreeRangeFrog, Gilderien, Gkornbluh, GoVeg, Harland1, Ieatweiners, J.Christopher.Wells, JTM, Jamesontai, Jetman,
Jgorrell, Jhorner2404, Jkaharper, Johnpacklambert, Joseph Solis in Australia, Jpt1234, Jsteffensen, Juha Suoranta, KYPark, Karpouzi, Koavf, LMBM2012, LaszloWalrus, Lexandalf, Ling.Nut,
Lockley, M4gnum0n, Magioladitis, Masterpiece2000, Melesse, Michael David, Michael Hardy, Michelebow, Monkeyassault, Mshecket, Mtreuil, Nakon, Nbrown905, Nesbit, Nick Number,
OS2Warp, Omnipaedista, Pearle, Phil Sandifer, PhnomPencil, Plindenbaum, Politepunk, PonceHill, RDates, Rjwilmsi, Scottlondon, SimonP, Skagedal, SlackerMom, Stmullin, Te Karere, The
Thing That Should Not Be, Thecraiger, Themfromspace, TonyClarke, Veronique50, Vina, Wgmccallum, Windharp, WinedAndDined, Xgkkp, Zentonil, Zombie Hunter Smurf, Zzuuzz, 145
anonymous edits

License
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0
//creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/