Jerome Bruner

When it comes to education many individuals have different views on how children should learn things. A psychologist by the name of Jerome Bruner had his own theory when it came to education. Bruner is a very smart man himself, who went to school to study and to learn about many different types of psychology to understand humans completely to the best of his knowledge. He strived to learn about cognitive growth and learning so he could help children in the future. This is what helped him develop his theory into what it is today. Jerome Seymour Bruner was born October 1st, 1915. Jerome received a bachelor’s degree in psychology in 1937. In 1939 he furthered his education to a master’s degree then to a doctorate degree in 1941. Bruner has made many contributions to different types of psychology such as cognitive psychology and cognitive learning theory in educational psychology. Also, he was interested in working with history and the general philosophy of education. Out of everyone in the world, Bruner happens to be one of the cognitive psychology movement pioneers in the United States. This is because he studied sensation and perspective as being active instead of them being passive processes. 1947, Jerome published Value and Need as Organizing Factors in Perception. This was a study he did for poor and rich children and they were to estimate the sizes of coins or wooden disks the size of nickels, American pennies, dimes, half-dollars, and quarters. The outcome showed that the poor and rich kids both to overestimate the size of the coins due to poor children not having money frequently enough to be able to memorize the size of it and rich children are so used to having money that they don’t pay attention to the size whatsoever. Experiments like this causes psychologists to challenge themselves to study an organisms internal interpretation and the organisms response