Bruner’s Work on Cognition and Constructivism

Jean Piaget and Jerome Bruner demonstrated how thought processes could be subdivided into three distinct modes of reasoning. While Piaget related each mode to a specific period of childhood development, Bruner saw each mode as dominant during each developmental phase, but present and accessible throughout. Bruner’s model of human development as a combination of enactive skills (manipulating objects, spatial awareness), iconic skills (visual recognition, the ability to compare and contrast) and symbolic skills (abstract reasoning) has influenced psychological and educational thought over the past 50 years. Bruner suggested that people remember things “with a view towards meaning and signification, not toward the end of somehow ‘preserving’ the facts themselves.” This view of knowledge – and memory – as a constructed entity is consistent with constructivism, with which Bruner is also closely associated.