Jerome Bruner:
a learning
theorist
Who is Jerome Bruner?
Learning theorist
Associated with the
Constructivist view of
learning
Originated Discovery method
Who is Jerome Bruner?
1915: Born in NYC
In WW2 worked for U.S. Army
intelligence reviewing the effectiveness
of propaganda.
1947 : Ph. D. , Psychology from Harvard
Positions on faculties of Harvard,
Oxford, and currently NYU
Founded Center for Cognitive studies
Who is Jerome Bruner?
rooted mainly in the study of
cognition
Reacted against behaviorist
model of learning
founded “New Look”
movement in psychology
What ideas and influences are
associated with Bruner?
1. Constructivism
paradigm of learning
learners create their own subjective
constructs of reality
2. Discovery learning
(originator)
•
method of instruction
•
learning is best achieved
What ideas and influences are
associated with Bruner?
Other Constructivists include Piaget, Vygotsky
and Dewey.
Builds on the concept of stages of
development (Piaget)
Environment has bigger role in learning
development.
"any subject can be taught effectively in
What is Discovery learning?
Learner builds on past experience Students interact with environment
Discovers facts and relationships on own
Students create own construct of knowledge through narrative
Teaching method
•
Inquiry based process
•
Focuses on learning through
experience
Advantages
of Discovery Learning
active engagement
promotes motivation
Promotes ownership of learning
the development of creativity and problem
solving skills.
Criticisms
of discovery learning
Too much information (cognitive overload)
Often requires vast resources unavailable in
traditional classroom.
Lack of teacher control
Potential misconceptions
Examples
of discovery
learning
learning with and through
narratives
case-based learning
guided discovery
problem-based learning
Importance of Narrative
What are the roles of narratives in the
following narrative?
Repairing Photocopiers
When I arrived at Xerox, back in the 1980s, the company was spending millions and
millions of dollars a year training its 23,000 "tech reps" around the world-the people who repair its copiers and printers. Lots of that training-it was like classroom
instruction seemed to have little effect. Xerox wanted me to come up with some intelligent-tutoring or artificial-intelligence system for teaching these people
troubleshooting. Fortunately, before we did so, we hired several anthropologists to go live in their "tribe" and see how they actually worked.
What the anthropologists learned surprised us. When a tech rep got stuck by a
machine, he or she didn't look at the manual or review the training; he or she called another tech rep. As the two of them stood over the problematic machine, they'd recall earlier machines and fixes, then connect those stories to a new one that explained some of the symptoms. Some fragment of the initial story would remind them of another incident, which suggested a new measurement or tweak, which reminded them of another story fragment and fix to try, and so on. Troubleshooting for these people, then, really meant construction of a narrative, one that finally explained the symptoms and test data and got the machine up and running again. Abstract, logical reasoning wasn't the way they went about it; stories were.
