BRUNER'S LEARNING BY DISCOVERY - ECONOMÍA - 2025

The discovery learning is a learning methodology in which the person is an active subject of research, ie the individual instead of receiving instructions and contents, must discover for himself associations and relationships between concepts, and adapt well to your cognitive schema.

It would be an inductive methodology based on the individual study and reaching general conclusions. It is obtained through individual premises and with specific information from each subject, and involves the restructuring of data to reach new knowledge.

It comes from cognitive psychology, it is also called heuristic and is opposed to reception learning. It encourages the person to acquire knowledge by himself, in a non-passive way, having to discover the learning material little by little, since it is not presented to him from the beginning.

Bruner, a psychologist and pedagogue, develops this constructivist theory known as discovery learning.

Jerome Seymour Bruner was a psychologist and pedagogue who was born in New York on October 1, 1915, dying on June 5, 2016. He developed theories about perception, learning, memory and other aspects of cognition in young children who had a strong influence on the American educational system.

In addition, he was one of the people who made important contributions in cognitive psychology and learning theories within the field of educational psychology.

In contrast, we find Ausubel, a very important psychologist and pedagogue also for constructivism, who defended the deductive method and expository teaching or learning by reception as the most appropriate method for the development of meaningful learning.

What is discovery learning?

Discovery learning is a type of active learning that comes thanks to the self-regulatory activity that people have to solve problems, in which the person builds their own knowledge.

The person is not provided with the final learning material, but must discover it himself. This discovery refers to the modification of experiences or facts that are presented to us to go beyond that given information, originating new ideas and solving problems or conflicts by oneself.

"Learning by discovery is the best way to stimulate the symbolic thinking and creativity of the individual" Bruner.

Think that the correct way of learning is achieved through discovery by the person. This process is guided and, in addition, it is motivated by the curiosity it arouses.

For this reason, he defends that before explaining the problem, the content, the relationship between concepts and providing instructions, people must be stimulated and motivated so that they come to discover what it is like, how things work by providing them with a certain material that guides that learning.

Through observation, comparison, analysis of similarities and differences, they come to discover, to achieve in an active way, the intended goal of learning.

For him, this learning aims to:

• Stimulation of students for learning, self-esteem and security.
• The development of metacognitive strategies (learning to learn).
• Overcoming the limitations of mechanistic learning.

Discovery Learning Theory Principles

1- People have a natural ability to discover knowledge

People are endowed with a self-regulatory capacity that is set in motion by applying cognitive, comprehensive and performance systems, interpreting reality and developing goals and action plans.

In this process of discovery, not only the intellectual level that the person presents intervenes, but also influences their emotional, affective, social, etc. Everything contributes to developing and carrying out this learning.

2- The final discovery that is reached is a realization that is made at the intrapsychic level

By this we mean that the discovery that the person reaches, although it does not serve on a collective level, does provide utility to oneself.

It is a novel intrapsychic process, an assimilative discovery made through the reconstruction of an already existing meaning in your cognitive system, with new elements.

3- Discovery learning begins with the recognition of problems

A problematic situation appears when a person does not have the necessary resources to solve it, frustration emerging and thus being able to trigger the reflective, search and discovery process of the individual where new meanings, ideas, theories are reformulated and reconstructed.

4- It consists of a development of the conflict resolution process

Problem solving process through hypothesis testing, through a constructive process through the testing of theories and actions that the subject performs to the problem raised.

5- Discovering finds its logic in the verification of hypotheses

The discovery process consists primarily of hypothesis testing, which is at the heart of the discovery process. It is useless to have hypotheses and that these are not verified.

6- The solving activity has to be self-regulated and creative to be identified as discovery

The person must self-regulate the process of problem solving and discovery, especially at the time of verification, requiring productive and creative thinking.

7- Learning by discovery is associated with the production of errors

The psychogenesis and epistemology of discovery demonstrate cognitive productivity.

Being aware of the mistake made leads to the elaboration of new hypotheses, since the subject is motivated to build new knowledge. It must be positively valued and encouraged to enable access to higher learning.

8- Learning by discovery is inherent to sociocultural mediation

This learning, despite being a self-regulatory and autonomous capacity, is influenced by our sociocultural environment.

Through global and cooperative learning experiences, they motivate the subject to argue their thinking and coordinate their action with respect to that of others, being very favorable for interpersonal cognitive discoveries.

9- The level of discovery is inversely proportional to the level of predetermination of the evolutionary process

The possibility of the cognitive experience of discovery will not occur if the self-regulatory capacity is not performing its function, because the process is not being carried out by ourselves but rather we are receiving both external and internal instructions.

10- Learning by discovery can be promoted

The discovery process follows certain guidelines, but these are not mechanized since it is a creative process that, although it is based on innate potentialities, can be educated, as it is a phenomenon of a social nature. This highlights the interaction and influence of others in their development.

Intellectual development and development of cognitive processes

Bruner states that intellectual development has similar characteristics throughout the world. At the beginning, the child's actions are linked to the environment but, as he grows and capacities develop, the actions become more independent and detached from the context thanks to the appearance of thought.

On the other hand, the development of cognitive processes has three main stages:

• Enactive representation. It appears first and develops thanks to the child's direct contact with objects and with the action problems that arise in the middle. They are actions that children take to achieve certain goals.
• Iconic representation. Representation of things through images or independent diagrams of the action, helping us to recognize objects when they change to a certain extent or are not exactly the same.
• Symbolic representation. Representing things through arbitrary symbols that do not have to have a direct relationship with the action, for this to take place it is necessary that the language has already appeared.

Through representation by action, the child interprets his world. Later it is followed by iconic representation and developing the ability of representation through images to transcend immediate objects and representation through action. Finally, symbolic representation appears when language arises and the individual controls objects and events.

Theory of instruction

Bruner, based on learning by discovery, proposes a theory that is built around four main aspects:

Willingness to learn

• Activation: uncertainty and curiosity that promotes exploration.
• Maintenance: once established, the behavior must be maintained and for this the exploration must be more beneficial than harmful.
• Direction: you have to establish a specific direction, an objective or goal as well as an understanding of the importance of reaching that goal or objective.

Structure and form of knowledge

• Mode of representation: knowledge can be represented in an enactive, iconic or symbolic way.
• Economics: degree of information that is needed to represent or process knowledge or understanding.
• Effective power: knowledge has value both on a real and psychological level.

Presentation sequence

Guided learning process, providing the child with individualized guidelines adapted to his previous, intellectual development and depending on what he is going to be taught.

With all the guidelines given, it is intended that you reach the objective, through an orderly sequence, with a difficulty that grows as you advance, going from enactive representations to ultimately symbolic ones.

The learning sequence will depend on the criterion on learning achievement that will depend on the speed of learning, mode of representation, economy, effective power, resistance to forgetting and transfer to other contexts.

Form and frequency of reinforcement

• Moment in which the information is delivered.
• Student conditions: the ability of the person depends on their internal states for the use of feedback.
• Form in which it is delivered.

Roles

Instructor

Mediator between knowledge and understanding on the part of individuals, enabling learning, providing strategies, carrying out activities, reviewing and answering questions, examining the correct execution of the guidelines and whether there are errors for them to correct themselves.

Apprentice

Build their knowledge, enriching it, rebuilding it, reworking their own representations, and transmitting what they have learned to other contexts.

Zone of proximal development

Bruner calls this material provided by the person scaffolding, a term that cannot be understood without referring to the concept developed by Vygotsky of the ZPD or Zone of Proximate Development.

This area is understood as the area or level of effective development in the person, that is, this area is the distance between the capacities and abilities that the person can do independently (level of real development), and the potential development level or area that can be reached but with help, called scaffolding.

The teacher or person who carries out this scaffolding process will give more support to the child at the beginning to collaborate in this learning process, but later they will withdraw them so that they are more independent in the construction of their own knowledge.

The difference between learning and the level of development that can be reached by being guided by another person was what Bruner called discovery learning, that is, the person must guide the learner to discover and build knowledge on their own.

At first, the differences between teacher and student are very notable, but little by little and as the person instructs and motivates the apprentice, the apprentice is no longer so dependent and each time he needs less support or scaffolding during the learning process. learning, achieving autonomy.

Therefore, the person who instructs has a guiding and "provoking" role in learning situations, to get the student to reflect thanks to the motivation and curiosity to reconsider their ideas and knowledge in order to seek new ideas, new knowledge, new goals. and new achievements shaped by the interaction of each one with their context, with their social environment and adapting them to their mental schemes.

For this process to be carried out successfully, the person must have sufficient motivation to push him to learn, that is, have the desire to learn.

References

1. Cervantes virtual center. Learning by discovery. Extracted from cvc.cervantes.es.
2. Jerome Bruner. Extracted from wikipedia.org.
3. Meaningful learning and discovery. Extracted from educando.edu.do.
4. Barrón Ruiz, A. Discovery learning: principles and inappropriate applications. Science Teaching (1993).