Jerome Seymour Bruner (October 1, 1915 – June 5, 2016) was an American psychologist who made significant contributions to human cognitive psychology and cognitive learning theory in educational psychology. Bruner was a senior research fellow at the New York University School of Law. He received a BA in 1937 from Duke University and a PhD from Harvard University in 1941. He taught and conducted research at Harvard University, the University of Oxford, and New York University. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Bruner as the 28th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
Bruner was born blind (as a result of cataracts) on October 1, 1915, in New York City, to Polish Jewish immigrants, Herman and Rose Bruner. An operation at age 2 restored his vision. He was awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree in psychology from Duke University in 1937; a master's in psychology in 1939 and a doctorate in psychology in 1941, both from Harvard University. Bruner published his first article on a psychological subject in 1939, examining 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 Allied Expeditionary Force committee under General Dwight D. Eisenhower, researching social psychological phenomena.
Bruner returned to Harvard in 1945 in the role of psychology professor, focusing on research in the fields of cognitive and educational psychology. In 1972, he left Harvard to teach at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. 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 (NYU), where he taught primarily in the School of Law.
As an adjunct professor at NYU School of Law, Bruner studied the effects of psychological factors on legal practice. During his career, Bruner was awarded honorary doctorates from Yale University, Columbia University, The New School, the Sorbonne, the ISPA Instituto Universitário, as well as from colleges and universities in Berlin and Rome; he was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the American Philosophical Society. Bruner was a distinguished member of Psi Chi. He turned 100 in October 2015 and died on June 5, 2016.
Bruner is one of the pioneers of cognitive psychology in the United States, which began through his own early research on sensation and perception as being active, rather than passive processes.
In 1947, Bruner published his study Value and Need as Organizing Factors in Perception, in which children from advantaged and disadvantaged backgrounds 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 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 for some cards (e.g. red spades and black hearts). 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 the book A Study of Thinking, which formally initiated the study of cognitive psychology. Soon afterward Bruner helped found the Harvard Center of Cognitive Studies. 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, later compiled into the book Acts of Meaning. In these lectures, Bruner contested the computer model of the mind, advocating a more holistic understanding of cognitive processes.
Beginning around 1967, Bruner turned his attention to the subject of developmental psychology and studied the way children learn. He coined the term "scaffolding" to describe an instructional process in which the instructor provides carefully programmed guidance, reducing the amount of assistance as the student progresses through task learning. Bruner suggested that students may experience, or "represent" tasks in three ways: 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, and it "is clearly the most mysterious of the three."
Bruner's learning theory suggests that 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. 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. First there is basic knowledge of a subject, then more sophistication is added, reinforcing principles that were first discussed. This system is used in China and India. Bruner's spiral curriculum, however, draws heavily from evolution to explain how to learn better and thus it drew criticism from conservatives. In the United States classes are split by grade—life sciences in 9th grade, chemistry in 10th, physics in 11th. The spiral teaches life sciences, chemistry, physics all in one year, then two subjects, then one, then all three again to understand how they mold together. Bruner also believed learning should be spurred by interest in the material rather than tests or punishment, since one learns best when one finds the acquired knowledge appealing.
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 Lyndon Johnson. Referencing his overall view that education should not focus merely on memorizing facts, Bruner wrote in Process of Education that "knowing how something is put together is worth a thousand facts about it." From 1964 to 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. Finally, in 1996, in The Culture of Education, Bruner reassessed the state of educational practices three decades after he had begun his educational research. Bruner was also credited with helping found the Head Start early childcare program. 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 which officially recognized the value of this innovative experience.