Blog Three, Theorist: Bruner

Bruner

Jerome Bruner, a cognitive psychologist, considered major significant developmental factors in the cognitive growth of children.

His findings were that intellectual growth:

• Is directly related to gaining independent responses from stimuli
• Depends on an internal information process and storage system – use a symbol system including language to predict and hypothesise
• Involves the ability to describe past and future actions
• Needs systematic interactions with teachers/tutors to sustain cognitive development
• Needs the use of language to converse ideas and problems with others and to link to the familiar (Marsh, 2004 pp. 23 - 24)
  
  http://www.infed.org/thinkers/bruner.htm
  
  This link explains key points about Bruner’s life and his educational theory.
  Bruner, based on his studies, developed three stages of cognitive growth. These are:

· The Enactive Stage:
o Learning by doing – holding, moving, touching, which provides children with a necessary understanding of their environment


· The Iconic Stage:
o Involves imagery but not language, ability to recognize instances of something without being able to give an account of the concept


· The Symbolic Stage:
o The final stage where children understand through symbols – language, logic and mathematics. In this stage the child learns how to store the information for later use. (Marsh, 2004 pp. 24)


Bruner’s work will be beneficial to my teaching as these stages coincide with other cognitive theorists such as Piaget and Vygotsky. Although as with the other theories, you cannot assume that the students will fit right into the category. A way I will try and get around it will be to include aspects of all three stages to hopefully cover a broad range of learning styles that will be in my classroom.