Modes of cognitive development (Bruner)

Modes of cognitive development (Bruner)                   

         Jerome Bruner is a psychologist who focused much of his research on the cognitive development of children and how it relates to education. Bruner’s theory of cognitive development focused on the symbolic activities that human beings employed in constructing and making sense not only of the world, but of themselves. Bruner theorizes that children construct knowledge using three modes of what he called representation that corresponds to developmental stages. Each mode is a way in which information or knowledge are stored and encoded in memory.

Bruner’s theory of cognitive development is concerned with ways of representing or thinking about knowledge at different ages. The three modes of representation develop in order and allow the child to think about the world in more sophisticated ways. The modes are:

• Enactive Mode (0 – 1 Years): This mode of representation is dominant in babies who first represent or interact with the world through their actions. Knowledge is therefore stored in muscle memory. At this stage the infant is unable to make use of language images or other symbolic representations for carrying out his thought processes and represents them through non-verbal activities based on motor actions and movements. Information is stored according to physical movements. When something has to be remembered, the movement is recreated.
• The Iconic Mode (1 – 6 Years): This mode represents knowledge through visual or auditory images. Children in this mode represents things and events in terms of sensory images or mental pictures. Children dominated by their iconic mode have difficulty thinking beyond their images, to categorize the knowledge or understand relationships between objects. Information is stored using images which may be based on smell, hearing or touch. A smell may trigger a memory.
• The Symbolic Mode (7 Years onwards):This mode enables children to encode the world in terms of information storing symbols such as the words of our language or the numbers of mathematics. This allows information to becategorized and summarized so that it can be more readily manipulated and considered. The symbolic mode allows children to think beyond the physical images of the iconic mode. Information is stored in the form of language and numbers.

Educational Implications

• Bruner stressed that the purpose of education is not to impart knowledge, but instead to facilitate a child's thinking and problem solving skills.
• Bruner argued that schools waste time trying to match the complexity of subject material to a child's cognitive stage of development. Topics must be taught only when the teacher believes that the child has reached the appropriate state of cognitive maturity.
• Bruner said that the information should be structured in such a way that the complex ideas be taught at a simplified level first, and then re-visited at more complex levels later on. Therefore, subjects would be taught at levels of gradually increasing difficultly (spiral curriculum).
• Bruner proposed that learners’ construct their own knowledge by organizing and categorizing information. He advocated the concept of discovery learning which implies that students should construct their own knowledge for themselves now it is known as the constructivist approach.
• The role of the teacher should not be to teach information by rote learning, but instead to facilitate the learning process. This means that a good teacher will design lessons that help student discover the relationship between bits of information.
• Bruner recommended using a combination of concrete, pictorial then symbolic activities will lead to more effective learning. According to Bruner at the primary level children should be allowed to manipulate objects. He insisted on activity approach. At the middle school level children should be allowed to learn by observing pictures, models, representations and some simple demonstrations. At the higher level, Lecture method involving symbols and languages can be used.