Jerome Bruner

Jerome Bruner (1915–2016) was an American psychologist who helped establish cognitive psychology and developed influential theories of learning, instruction, and human development.

Cognitive psychology: The study of mental processes such as perception, memory, reasoning, and language. Bruner helped shift psychology toward explaining thought through internal mental processes.
Modes of representation: Bruner’s account of knowledge represented through action, imagery, and symbolic systems. The three modes explain how learners can grasp the same subject in different forms.
Man: A Course of Study: A US social-studies curriculum project developed in the 1960s under Bruner’s leadership. The project put his emphasis on disciplinary structure and inquiry into classroom materials.
Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies: An interdisciplinary research center founded at Harvard in 1960 to study cognition. Bruner co-founded and co-directed the center, a hub of the cognitive revolution.
Cognitive development: Changes in thinking and reasoning abilities across a person’s life. Bruner examined how children’s ways of representing and understanding the world develop.
Spiral curriculum: A curriculum design that revisits core ideas at increasing levels of complexity. Bruner proposed returning to fundamental ideas as learners gain more powerful ways to understand them.
The Process of Education: Bruner’s 1960 book arguing that children can learn the structure of academic subjects. This book set out his case for a spiral curriculum and intellectually serious schooling.
George Miller: An American psychologist whose research on memory and language helped shape cognitive science. Miller co-founded Harvard’s Center for Cognitive Studies with Bruner.
Constructivism (learning theory): The view that learners actively build knowledge by interpreting experience and connecting ideas. Bruner treated learning as active meaning-making rather than passive reception.
Structure of the disciplines: The organizing concepts and principles that give a field of study coherence. Bruner argued that teaching a subject’s underlying structure makes later learning more transferable.

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