Jerome Bruner, American psychologist, Died at 100

Jerome Seymour Bruner was born on October 1, 1915, and died on June 5, 2016.

He was an American psychologist.

He made significant contributions to human cognitive psychology and cognitive learning theory in educational psychology.

He was a senior research fellow at the New York University School of Law.

Jerome Bruner received a B.A. in 1937 from Duke University and a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1941.

There was a Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Bruner as the 28th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.

In World War II, Bruner served on the Psychological Warfare Division of the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force Europe committee under Eisenhower, researching social psychological phenomena.

During 1945 Bruner returned to Harvard as a psychology professor and was heavily involved in research relating to cognitive psychology and educational psychology.

During 1970 Bruner left Harvard to teach at the University of Oxford in England.

Jerome Bruner returned to the United States in 1980 to continue his research in developmental psychology.

He joined the faculty at New York University, in 1991 where he still teaches students as of 2015.

Whilst he was an adjunct professor at NYU School of Law, Jerome studies how psychology affects legal practice.

Over the period of his long career, Bruner has been awarded honorary doctorates from Yale, Columbia, Sorbonne, ISPA Instituto Universitário, as well as colleges and universities in such locations as Berlin and Rome, and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In 1956, Bruner published the book A Study of Thinking, which formally initiated the study of cognitive psychology.

Early afterward Bruner helped found the Center of Cognitive Studies at Harvard.

Beginning around 1967 Bruner turned his attention to the subject of developmental psychology and studied the way children learn.

Jerome Bruner coined the term “scaffolding” to describe the way children often build on the information they have already mastered.

While Bruner was at Harvard he published a series of works about his assessment of current educational systems and ways that education could be improved.

Professor Buner published the book Process of Education, in 1961.

During the year 1972, Bruner was appointed Watts Professor of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford, where he remained until 1980.

At Oxford, he focused on early language development.

During 1991 Bruner arrived at NYU as a visiting professor to do research and to found the Colloquium on the Theory of Legal Practice.

The objective of that institution was to “study how law was practiced and how its practice can be understood by using tools developed in anthropology, psychology, linguistics, and literary theory.

Jerome Bruner passed away at 100 yrs old.