Who is credited with popularizing the case for the discovery approach in the…

Concept — Discovery learning is an inductive model of instruction: instead of being handed the conclusion first, the learner is placed before data, examples or a problem situation and works out the underlying principle or structure independently. Its central claim is that a principle the learner reconstructs is better organised in memory, retained longer and transferred more readily than one received ready-made, so the teacher's task becomes arranging the situations in which that reconstruction can take place.

Application — For school curriculum subjects this case was argued and popularized by Jerome Bruner. In The Process of Education (1960) and the essay The Act of Discovery (1961) he held that every subject has a structure — a small set of core ideas together with the relations between them — and that a learner grasps that structure by acting on material rather than by being told about it. From this followed his claim that any subject can be taught in an intellectually honest form to a child at any stage of development, and the spiral curriculum, in which those core ideas are met again in progressively more formal terms. His three modes of representation — enactive (through action), iconic (through images) and symbolic (through language and symbols) — describe how the understanding a learner builds is successively re-coded.

Cross-check — the other names in the set are each tied to a different body of work:

• H.E. Armstrong, a British chemist, framed the heuristic method for school science teaching, in which pupils work in the laboratory as investigators establishing results experimentally; it is a closely related idea, but it is put forward for science instruction rather than as a general case for discovery across curriculum subjects.

• Jean Piaget described how children's thinking develops through four stages — sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational and formal operational — with change explained by assimilation and accommodation; this is a theory of development, not a curricular method.

• Thorndike's connectionism treated learning as the strengthening of stimulus–response bonds through trial and error, summarised in his laws of readiness, exercise and effect — an associationist account in which the learner is shaped by consequences rather than by inquiry.

So the credit for popularizing the case for the discovery approach in the learning of school curriculum subjects goes to Jerome Bruner.