Jerome Bruner

Jerome Seymour Bruner ideas on learning is based on categorization; from perception, forming concepts, learning and making decisions. He believed that people learned by organizing the similarities and differences in new material with previously learned information. He suggests people form a hierarchical arrangement of related categories with higher levels becoming more specific. He proposed three stages of learning: enactive (action-based, like the manipulation of objects), iconic (image-based, like mental images of objects), and symbolic (language-based).

His theory suggests that learning is most effective when faced with new material to follow a progression from enactive to iconic and finally symbolic representation. Bruner's believed that anyone is capable of learning any material so long as the instruction is organized appropriately.  I believe this is referring to tapping into the students' prior knowledge before introducing new material. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerome_Bruner)  Bruner believed that a learner would find some sort of match between new data and some internal templates of intellectual data. They then reorganize the new learning into their current knowledge base. This inquiry based learning supported better retention of new knowledge.

Two other websites I found helpful were:

http://www.learning-theories.com/discovery-learning-bruner.html

http://starfsfolk.khi.is.solrunb/jbruner.htm_3.htm