Jerome Bruner
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Jerome Bruner (1915- ) is a noted psychologist. He has had an enormous impact on educational psychology with his contributions to cognitive learning theory. Bruner's ideas are based on categorization. "To perceive is to categorize, to conceptualize is to categorize, to learn is to form categories, to make decisions is to categorize." Bruner maintains people interpret the world in terms of its similarities and differences. Similar to Bloom's Taxonomy Bruner suggests a system of coding in which people form heirarchical 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. Also, Bruner has suggested that there are two primary modes of thought-- the narrative mode and the paradigmatic mode. In narrative thinking, the mind engages in sequential, action-oriented, detail-driven thought. In paradigmatic thinking, the mind transcends particularities to achieve systematic, categorical cognition. In the former case, thinking takes the form of stories and "gripping drama." In the latter, thinking is structured as propositions linked by logical operators.
Books from Bruner
- Toward a Theory of Instruction
- The Culture of Education
- Acts of Meaning
- Actual Minds, Possible Worldsde:Jerome Bruner