http://www.psy.pdx.edu/PsiCafe/KeyTheorists/Bruner.htm
http://www.law.nyu.edu/faculty/profiles/bios/brunerj_bio.html
http://tip.psychology.org/bruner.html
JEROME BRUNER
1915-CURRENT
"Learners are encouraged to discover facts and relationships for themselves." 
Jerome Bruner was born October 1, 1915 in New York City. Bruner received his A.B. from Duke University in 1937 and his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1941. He was formally a professor of Psychology at Harvard University (1952-1972) and Oxford (1972-1980). Currently he is at the the New York University of Law. In 1960, he wrote The Process of Education, which emphasizes curriculum innovation grounded in theories of cognitive development. 
Bruner asserts that learning is an active process in which students construct new ideas or concepts based on their current knowledge.

The British director Jonathan Miller once teased Jerome Bruner on the BBC for having rehabilitated what in the dark days of behaviorist psychology was a dirty four-letter word: m-i-n-d. Not far off the mark. In his long career, first as Professor of Psychology at Harvard and then as Watts Professor at Oxford, he has been at the forefront of what became, in the 1960s, the much heralded Cognitive Revolution that today dominates psychology around the world. In 1991, Bruner came to the NYU School of Law School as Meyer Visiting Professor to collaborate with Anthony Amsterdam, Peggy Cooper Davis, and David Richards in founding and teaching the Colloquium on the Theory of Legal Practice - an effort to study how law is practiced and how its practice can be understood by using tools developed in anthropology, psychology, linguistics, and literary theory. He has remained as a research professor, spending a major portion of his time as an adjunct professor at the Law School exploring the interaction of cultural and legal practice and co-teaching the "Lawyering Theory Colloquium." "To my delight," he says, "my colleagues and students at the Law School have proved to be real allies in helping us all understand how the law shapes our thinking, talking, and feeling and, in turn, is shaped by them." Never content with academic work alone, Bruner helped start the educational reform movement in this country during the early '60s and served on the President's Science Advisory Committee during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. His book, The Process of Education, published in 1961, was and continues to be one of the movement's major guides. Bruner has since been involved in a variety of educational enterprises, including the founding of Head Start, of which he was a major architect. Throughout his illustrious career, Bruner has received many awards and honors -- among them the International Balzan Prize, the CIBA Gold Medal for Distinguished Research, as well as the Distinguished Scientific Award of the American Psychological Association.	

Constructivist Theory (J. Bruner) 
Overview: 
A major theme in the theoretical framework of Bruner is that learning is an active process in which learners construct new ideas or concepts based upon their current/past knowledge. The learner selects and transforms information, constructs hypotheses, and makes decisions, relying on a cognitive structure to do so. Cognitive structure (i.e., schema, mental models) provides meaning and organization to experiences and allows the individual to "go beyond the information given". 
As far as instruction is concerned, the instructor should try and encourage students to discover principles by themselves. The instructor and student should engage in an active dialog (i.e., socratic learning). The task of the instructor is to translate information to be learned into a format appropriate to the learner's current state of understanding. Curriculum should be organized in a spiral manner so that the student continually builds upon what they have already learned. 
Bruner (1966) states that a theory of instruction should address four major aspects: (1) predisposition towards learning, (2) the ways in which a body of knowledge can be structured so that it can be most readily grasped by the learner, (3) the most effective sequences in which to present material, and (4) the nature and pacing of rewards and punishments. Good methods for structuring knowledge should result in simplifying, generating new propositions, and increasing the manipulation of information. 
In his more recent work, Bruner (1986, 1990, 1996) has expanded his theoretical framework to encompass the social and cultural aspects of learning as well as the practice of law. 
Scope/Application: 
Bruner's constructivist theory is a general framework for instruction based upon the study of cognition. Much of the theory is linked to child development research (especially Piaget  <piaget.html>). The ideas outlined in Bruner (1960) originated from a conference focused on science and math learning. Bruner illustrated his theory in the context of mathematics and social science programs for young children (see Bruner, 1973). The original development of the framework for reasoning processes is described in Bruner, Goodnow & Austin (1951). Bruner (1983) focuses on language learning in young children. 
Note that Constructivism is a very broad conceptual framework in philosophy and science and Bruner's theory represents one particular perspective. For an overview of other Constructivist frameworks, see <http://carbon.cudenver.edu/~mryder/itc_data/constructivism.html>.
Example: 
This example is taken from Bruner (1973): 
"The concept of prime numbers appears to be more readily grasped when the child, through construction, discovers that certain handfuls of beans cannot be laid out in completed rows and columns. Such quantities have either to be laid out in a single file or in an incomplete row-column design in which there is always one extra or one too few to fill the pattern. These patterns, the child learns, happen to be called prime. It is easy for the child to go from this step to the recognition that a multiple table , so called, is a record sheet of quantities in completed mutiple rows and columns. Here is factoring, multiplication and primes in a construction that can be visualized." 
Principles: 
1. Instruction must be concerned with the experiences and contexts that make the student willing and able to learn (readiness). 
2. Instruction must be structured so that it can be easily grasped by the student (spiral organization). 
3. Instruction should be designed to facilitate extrapolation and or fill in the gaps (going beyond the information given). 
References: 
Bruner, J. (1960). The Process of Education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 
Bruner, J. (1966). Toward a Theory of Instruction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 
Bruner, J. (1973). Going Beyond the Information Given. New York: Norton. 
Bruner, J. (1983). Child's Talk: Learning to Use Language. New York: Norton. 
Bruner, J. (1986). Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 
Bruner, J. (1990). Acts of Meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bruner, J. (1996). The Culture of Education, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 
Bruner, J., Goodnow, J., & Austin, A. (1956). A Study of Thinking. New York: Wiley. 
More about Bruner can be found at:
<http://www.infed.org/thinkers/bruner.htm>
<http://www.psy.pdx.edu/PsiCafe/KeyTheorists/Bruner.htm>