Jerome Bruner

The third stage is the Concrete Operational Stage, which occurs around age seven to age eleven. This stage marks the beginning of logical or operational thoughts for the child. Their thinking becomes less egocentric, and the child can now understand that although the appearance of something changes, the “thing” itself does not. For example, if a child decided to spread out a pile of blocks, they know there are still as many blocks as there were before, even though it looks different.

Jean Piaget, a Swiss psychologist, made substantial findings in intellectual development. His Cognitive Theory influenced both the fields of education and psychology. Piaget identified four major periods of cognitive development: the sensorimotor stage, the preoperational stage, the concrete operations stage, and the stage of formal operations. The preoperational stage includes children two to four years of age and is characterized by the development and refinement of schemes for symbolic representation. During the preoperational stage lies, what Piaget coined, the intuitive period. This phase occurs during the ages of 4-7 and during this time, the child’s thinking is largely centered on the way things appear to be rather than on

Children develop cognition through two main stages that Jean Piaget theorized. The stages run from birth and infancy to school age children. Sensorimotor is the first stage and goes from birth to about the age of two. This stage implies that the children learn about the environment they live in and they learn this through the reflexes and movements they produce. They also learn that they are separate people from their parents and they can say goodbye to them and know they will come back. The second stage is called the preoperational stage. During this stage of development, children will learn how to incorporate symbols to represent objects. This is also the beginning of learning the alphabet and speech. The child is still very much egocentric at this point in time, but with the help of understanding educators, the child will grow appropriately onto the next stages of development. Finally, the children need to develop emotionally/socially.

David Bremer portrays a story about his “wild, woolly, disturbed and fun filled youth” by illustrating years full of pranks and fun situations gone slightly wrong. David’s older brother helped pave the way into the world of pranks by taking them to the extreme. He vividly describes stinky socks and the way those were used as a weapon in their pranking wars. Their sister while very much apart of the pranks, had a more tasteful approach, meaning David had to be more creative in an attempt to trick her. After finding fish eyes on the counter he concluded that glueing them to his forehead and sitting in the hamper would in fact be the best way to startle his sister. This prank instead reeks havoc and leads to the lodgement of a flashlight in David’s throat. At the sight of this combined with the glued fish eyes, David’s mother then faints from shock. Consequently, David is yelled at and told to throw the fish eyes away, but instead keeps them to prank everyone else in the town. His plan succeeds and everyone is rather scared by his shenanigans. A little distracted by

Psychologist Jean Piaget (1936) believed that children are ‘active learners’ and that they are able to grasp concepts by advancing through four stages of cognitive development, these are; the sensorimotor stage, the preoperational stage, the concrete operational stage and the formal operational stage. These four stages of cognitive development are very similar to constructivist Jerome Bruner’s (1960) three modes of representation (as his ideas stem from those of Piaget). Bruner’s three modes of representation are; enactive (action based) - this involves encrypting action based information and storing it mentally in our memory, iconic (image based) – in this mode of representation, information is stored visually, symbolic (language based) – in this mode, information is able to be stored in code and symbols. Once you reach this mode of representation, actions as well as images stored in our memory

The fourth and final stage is the phase where children entering puberty begin to think abstractly and create meaning from available data. This critical stage is responsible for creating global problem solvers and creative thinkers who can analyze a situation and not be confined by concrete ideas or previously accepted logic.(www.lifescript.com)

Children are able to reverse their thought process and converse and understand numbers . They begin to structure time and space and to think logically . In his stage children can apply logic to concrete situations.

stage. This involve the increase in logic, the ability to use reasoning and understanding different

Infants in this stage learn from schemes or the organization of their knowledge, which then influences how they interpret the world and react to it. They learn how to use their sensory stimuli to respond to events and how to utilize skills and abilities that they are born with to learn about their surroundings.

operational stage, which is the third in Piaget's theory of cognitive development. At this stage, most

Logical thinking at this stage accelerates. Children begin to question and put thoughts together. Such as how does Santa Claus visit everyone in the world in one night? Or how does he get into the house we have no fireplace? Children are school age at this stage and begin learning foreign concepts and display this new found knowledge thinking they know more than their parents. However, children struggle with abstract concepts at this stage. The need of proof is constant the ability to see or touch something as proof of its validity. A concept such as freedom as an example is hard to understand. Concrete concepts is what children understand at this age. Objects, written rules, and real things is what children really understand at this

Operations, according to Dr. Piaget every stage is marked by shifts, changes how kids understand the world (Cherry, n.d.) I will get more into details on the four different stages later on. Piaget describes children as dynamic and enthused learners. He believed that children are curious by nature about the world around them and are constantly looking for information that provides them the tools to make sense of it (Ormrod, 2014). In other words, children are naturally inquisitive about their surroundings, wanting to explore and know everything they put their eyes on.

According to Piaget, there are four major stages of cognitive development: sensorimotor stage, preoperational stage, concrete operations, and stage of formal operations (Shaffer & Kipp, 2014). All children go through the stages in a sequence and in order to get to the next stage they cannot skip a stage (Shaffer & Kipp, 2014). That is because, "… each successive stage builds on the accomplishments of previous stages" (Shaffer & Kipp, 2014).

The third stage is the concrete operations stage from ages 7-11. In this stage children have learned to consider others thoughts and feelings as well as their own and are now able to process more complex thinking (Lefrancois, 2012). Piaget also felt that direct teaching instead of using an example, was better for children to learn because children learn from their experiences (Lefrancois, 2012). According to Piaget a child’s knowledge grows from using concrete objects, objects of different sizes, shapes, colors, and the child learns to sort, classify, compare, and sequence, they make discoveries, they experiment, and they modify their way of thinking (Lefrancois, 2012). Children should have a variety of toys and materials to experiment with and teachers should let the children in the preschool age explore, play make believe, and involve themselves with the children so that they are able to learn on their own with guidance.

Jerome Seymour Bruner is an American psychologist who made signification contributions to educational, cognitive and developmental psychology. This paper will focus on who Bruner is, his main theories explained, plus a comparison between Bruner and Piaget and the effectiveness of Bruners theories in the classroom.