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The field of developmental psychology was dominated throughout much of the 20th century by Jean Piaget, who explained how a child’s thinking develops and matures in stages, as a result of a natural curiosity to explore the environment. Lev Vygotsky’s theory, which appeared in English shortly after Piaget’s, also claimed that a child finds meaning through experience, but widened the meaning of the word “experience” to encompass(包含) cultural and social experience. Children, he said, learn mainly through interaction with other people.
At this point in the 1960s, the “cognitive revolution” was gaining momentum; mental processes were increasingly being explained by the analogy of the brain as an “information processor”. Jerome Bruner was a key figure in this new approach, having previously studied the ways that our needs and motivations influence perception – and concluding that we see what we need to see. He became interested in how cognition develops, and so began to study cognitive processes in children.
A spiral curriculum would work best in schools, Bruner suggested. This involves a constant revisiting(再访) of ideas, building incrementally(递增地) until the child reaches a high level of understanding.
The mind as processor
began his investigations by applying cognitive models to Piaget and Vygotsky’s ideas, shifting the emphasis in the study of cognitive development from the construction of meaning to the processing of information: the means by which we acquire and store knowledge. Like Piaget, he believes that acquiring knowledge is an experiential process; but like Vygotsky, sees this as a social occupation, not a solitary one. He maintains that learning cannot be conducted unassisted: some form of instruction is essential to a child’s development, but “to instruct someone… is not a matter of getting him to commit results to mind.
Rather, it is to teach him to participate in the process”. When we acquire knowledge, we need to actively participate and reason, rather than passively absorb information, because this is what gives knowledge meaning. In terms of cognitive psychology, reasoning is seen as “processing information”, so the acquisition of knowledge should be seen as a process, not a product or end result. We need encouragement and guidance in that process, and for Bruner, that is the role of a teacher.
In The Process of Education (1960), Bruner presented the idea that children should be active participants in the process of education. The book became a landmark text, altering educational policy in the USA at governmental and school-teacher level.
MORE TO KNOW…
APPROACH
Cognitive development
BEFORE
1920s Lev Vygotsky develops his theory that cognitive development is both a social and a cultural process.
1952 Jean Piaget publishes his developmental theories in his book, The Origins of Intelligence in Children.
AFTER
1960s The teaching programme “Man: A Course of Study (MACOS)”, based on Bruner’s theories, is adopted in schools in the USA, the UK, and Australia.
1977 Albert Bandura publishes Social Learning Theory, which looks at development through a mixture of behavioural and cognitive aspects.
JEROME BRUNER
The son of Polish immigrants in New York City, Jerome Seymour Bruner was born blind, but regained his sight after cataract operations at the age of two. His father died of cancer when Bruner was 12, and his grief-stricken mother moved the family frequently during his subsequent school years. He studied psychology at Duke University, North Carolina, then at Harvard, where he attained a PhD in 1941 in the company of Gordon Allport and Karl Lashley.
Bruner served in the US army’s Office for Strategic Studies (an intelligence unit) during World War II, then returned to Harvard, where he collaborated with Leo Postman and George Armitage Miller. In 1960, he co-founded the Center for Cognitive Studies with Miller at Harvard, remaining until it closed in 1972. He spent the next ten years teaching in Oxford, before returning to the USA. Bruner continued to teach into his nineties.
Key works
1960 The Process of Education
1966 Studies in Cognitive Growth
1990 Acts of Meaning
以下是我写的关于The Psychology Book的其他章节，欢迎各位前来观看 ^ ^
