Jerome Bruner’s Constructivist Theory

by MOHAMMED RHALMI · Published August 7, 2011 · Updated June 3, 2012

Jerome Bruner was one of the most influential constructivists. He was influenced by Piaget’s
ideas about cognitive development in children. His ideas have been widely discussed among
educators and teachers. Some of Bruner’s theoretical principles focus on these ideas:

 Nature of Learning and learning process.

 Instructional scaffolding
 The intellectual development of the learner

Learning
Learning for Bruner is an active process. The learning process include according to Bruner:

 selection and transformation of information,

 decision-making,
 generating hypotheses,
 and making meaning from information and experiences.

Learners are able to construct new knowledge based on their current or past knowledge.

Bruner focuses on the importance of categorization in every aspect of learning. This is done
through the interpretation of information and experiences by similarities and differences.

Focus is on the significance of categorization in learning. “To perceive is to categorize, to

conceptualize is to categorize, to learn is to form categories, to make decisions is to categorize.”
Interpreting information and experiences by similarities and differences is a key concept.

Effective instruction
Bruner emphasized four characteristics of effective instruction which emerged from his
theoretical constructs.

1. Personalized: instruction should relate to learners’ predisposition, and facilitate interest

toward learning,
2. Content Structure: content should be structured so it can be most easily grasped by the
learner
3. Sequencing: sequencing is an important aspect for presentation of material
4. Reinforcement: rewards and punishment should be selected and paced appropriately.
Bruner also contends that any child can be instructed any subject in some intellectually honest
form any stage of development. This notion led Bruner to present his concept of the spiral
curriculum which states that a curriculum should revisit basic ideas, building on them until the
student had grasped the full formal concept.

Instructional scaffolding
Based on Vygotsky‘s ideas about the Zone of Proximal Development, Jerome Bruner and
other educational psychologists developed the important concept of instructional scaffolding.
This refers to the process through which able peers or adults offer supports for learning. This
assistance becomes gradually less frequent as it becomes unnecessary, as when constructing a
building a scaffold is removed.

Intellectual development
Bruner postulated three stages of intellectual development.

1. Enactive
A person learns about the world through actions on physical objects and the outcomes of
these actions.
2. Iconic
Using models and pictures to obtain learning.
3. Symbolic
Developing the ability to think in abstract terms.

According to Bruner, when the learner is faced with new knowledge, a combination of concrete,
pictorial and symbolic activities will lead to more effective learning. This holds true even for
adult learners. These stages are not necessarily neatly delineated. They are, however, modes of
representation that are integrated and only loosely sequential as they “translate” into each other.