Early years pioneer Jerome Bruner dies aged 100

Dr Bruner, who invented the term ‘scaffolding’ to define the role of adults in children’s learning, was instrumental in changing the way people thought about thought, developmental psychology and early years education. The breadth of his contribution included his latest role as adjunct professor at New York University School of Law, studying how psychology affects legal practice.

His achievements date back to the 1940s, where, as a researcher at Harvard, he began to question the then-predominant theory of behaviourism. This was where learning was seen in simple terms of of stimulus and response, which had been shown in experiments involving animals such as the chime of a bell to indicate mealtimes inducing salivation in dogs.

Bruner showed that humans were much more sophisticated, with other internal factors such as culture and motive all playing a part in thinking and perception.

To illustrate how materially perceptions can vary, he showed in 1947 that poor and rich children estimated the size of coins differently. The extent to which children valued or needed the coins had a direct impact on how big they saw them, with poor children significantly overestimating the size of the coins.

Scaffolding describes the way children often build on the information they have already mastered, and where the adult should gradually transfer responsibility for learning until the child can operate independently. A related idea of his was the spiral curriculum, where each subject is revisited at intervals, in age-appropriate language, in more depth. It had been used widely in the US in the 1960s and 70s, but its use declined after being criticised by conservative politicians for its cross-cultural references and emphasis on evolution theory.

His books include 'The Process of Education' (1960) which contained the widely-quoted phrase 'We begin with the hypothesis that any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any age of development.'

He worked for much of his career in Harvard Unversity, but it was his work at Oxford, where he was professor of experimental psychology from 1972 to 1980, which highlighted the importance of social interactions to academic progress. It had a direct impact on UK policymaking, being included in Lady Plowden’s groundbreaking 1967 report on early years education, which stressed that at the 'heart of the educational process lies the child'.

In the 1990s, in his eighties, his work included regular trips to preschools in Reggio Emilia, which counts him as one of the fathers of the school of thought, along with Piaget, Dewey, and Vygotsky.

'Why are we so intellectually dismissive towards narrative?' he pondered in a Guardian interview in 2007. 'Why are we inclined to treat it as rather a trashy, if entertaining, way of thinking about and talking about what we do with our minds? ... If pupils are encouraged to think about the different outcomes that could have resulted from a set of circumstances, they are demonstrating useability of knowledge.'

Born in 1915, to Polish immigrants, he was blind until the age of two where his sight was partially restored. He worked until the age of 98 and died on Sunday at his home in Manhattan. He was married three times and had two children.