Bruner's Theory Of Learning Theory

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This week we read up on two theories, one founded by Bruner and the other by Ausubel. I will explain the main points of each theory, starting with Bruner’s view of people as being active in the process of learning, continually structuring and restructuring their environment. Bruner believes that people selectively perceive certain aspects of their environment, represent those perceptions internally, and then act on those internal representations. His views on learning as an active process made him a major proponent of the discovery learning approach. In this question-based approach, a learner encounters a problem, and he/she draws on his/her own past experience and existing knowledge to "discover" facts and relationships and new truths, in…show more content…
Bruner believes that when the basic structure of a subject (consisting of the ideas, concepts, principles, and their relationships) is emphasized, the learners will be more able to improve their intuitive thinking. Understanding the fundamental structure of a subject makes it more comprehensible. Bruner viewed categorization as a fundamental process in the structuring of knowledge. He believed that categorization made details easier to remember, and allowed for knowledge to be transferable to other contexts, etc. Bruner gave much attention to categorization of information in the construction of internal cognitive maps. He believed that perception, conceptualization, learning, decision making, and making inferences all involved categorization. He suggested a system of coding in which people form a hierarchical arrangement of related categories. Each successively higher level of categories becomes more specific. The coding…show more content…
If a person has prior knowledge in his/her cognitive structure to which new information can be related, then the learning is meaningful. If not, then learning can only occur in a rote manner. The key difference here is that the process of learning does not depend on whether the learner has discovered the content through a discovery learning process, or whether the content is given to the learner in the final form as in reception learning. In fact, there are several limitations in discovery learning. For one thing, discovery learning almost certainly will take longer because the learner has to figure out what he/she has to learn and then go about the process of bringing the new knowledge in and relating it to prior knowledge in their cognitive structures to form meaning. Another limitation is that the student may discover some incorrect information and therefore learn wrong

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