Jerome Bruner is a psychologist who made contributions to human cognitive psychology and the cognitive learning theory in educational psychology. Bruner believes that learning should be spurred by interest rather than tests and suggested that every person, even children can learn anything as long as the information is organised properly.
Bruner proposed three methods of representation of how children develop. These are enactive (action based), iconic (image based) and symbolic (language based). This links to his theory of a ‘spiral’ curriculum where teaching is first taught enactive, secondly iconic and thirdly symbolic.
This theory is seen in schools today as teachers review lessons, but in more depth as children get older. Learning is revisited at different stages, for example in year 7 the basic knowledge of the subject will be taught, but in year 8 there will be more in depth knowledge given to the students and this will happen every year until their last year in school where the students will understand the full aspect of the subject.
Jean Piaget:
Jean Piaget was a development theorist and philosopher. He believed that children progressed through four stages due to their age. These are 0 to 2, 2 to 7, 7 to 11 and adolescents to adults. These four stages are known as the four stages of cognitive development and mark the shifts of how children understand the world.
Piaget believed that children were like scientists and they tried to try hard to make sense of the world and the things which they see in everyday life. Within school, children learn by cause and effect which for an example is knowing that a mouse operates on a computer screen. When testing his theory, Piaget did not observe many children so the overall result can be debated about his findings on how children develop.
We see Piaget’s theory of development in today’s society as we still class children depending on their age. Before the age of 4 children go to play