astronomy

Urie Bronfenbrenner

Urie Bronfenbrenner is a astronomy topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Urie Bronfenbrenner rather than just read about it. In short: Urie Bronfenbrenner (April 29, 1917 – September 25, 2005) was a Russian-born American psychologist best known for using a contextual framework to better understand human development. This framework, broadly referred to as 'ecological systems theory', was formalized in an article published in American Psychologist, articulated in a series of propositions and hypotheses in his most cited book, The Ecology of Human Dev…

Key takeaways

Urie Bronfenbrenner belongs to astronomy; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Urie Bronfenbrenner to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Urie Bronfenbrenner from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Urie Bronfenbrenner (April 29, 1917 – September 25, 2005) was a Russian-born American psychologist best known for using a contextual framework to better understand human development. This framework, broadly referred to as 'ecological systems theory', was formalized in an article published in American Psychologist, articulated in a series of propositions and hypotheses in his most cited book, The Ecology of Human Development and further developed in The Bioecological Model of Human Development and later writings. He argued that natural experiments and applied developmental interventions provide valuable scientific opportunities. These beliefs were exemplified in his involvement in developing the US Head Start program in 1965. Bronfenbrenner's writings about the limitations of understanding child development solely from experimental laboratory research and the potential for using contextual variability to provide insight into developmental processes was important in changing the focus of developmental psychology.

Early life and education Bronfenbrenner was born in Moscow on April 29, 1917, to Russian Jewish parents, the pathologist Alexander Bronfenbrenner and Eugenie Kamenetski. When he was six, his family moved to the United States, first to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and then a year later to rural New York State. His father worked as a neuropathologist at a hospital for the developmentally disabled called Letchworth Village, located in Rockland County, N.Y. Bronfenbrenner received a bachelor's in psychology and music from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, in 1938. He earned a master's in education from Harvard in 1940, and a doctorate in developmental psychology from the University of Michigan in 1942.

Career Bronfenbrenner entered the U.S. military the day after receiving his doctorate, going on to serve as a psychologist in various military bodies during World War II. After the war, he briefly worked as an assistant chief clinical psychologist for the newly-founded Veterans Administration Clinical Psychology Training Program in Washington, D.C. After working as an assistant professor at the University of Michigan for two years he moved to Cornell University in 1948 as an assistant professor in the Department of Child Development and Family Relations (now the Cornell Department of Human Development). The department was located in the College of Home Economics, one of the state-supported, Land Grant colleges within Cornell University. As a land grant college, it had a strong applied mission and included a nursery school. It was also an interdisciplinary department, including sociologists and historians as well as psychologists. At Cornell, his research focused on child development and the impact of social forces in this development for the rest of his career. He was appointed to a federal panel about development in impoverished children around 1964 and 1965, with this panel helping in the creation of Head Start in 1965. Bronfenbrenner wrote over 300 research papers and 14 books, and achieved the title of Jacob Gould Schurman Professor Emeritus of Human Development at Cornell University.

Personal life He was married to Liese Price and had six children and grandchildren (photo, p. 18, below). According to Cornell University's 150th Anniversary magazine on the founding of Human Ecology (Vol. 43, No.1, Spring 2015), Urie Brofenbrenner hiked with his father Alexander, first in their native Odessa, Ukraine, and after the family emigrated in 1923, to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and then upstate New York (p. 14, Into the woods: How a father's queries sparked a new theory of human development, by Sharon Tregaskis, Class of 1995).

Death He died at his home in Ithaca, New York, on September 25, 2005, at the age of 88, due to complications with diabetes.

Views on human development and ecological systems theory Bronfenbrenner saw the process of human development as being shaped by the interaction between an individual and their environment. The specific path of development was a result of the influences of a person's surroundings, such as their parents, friends, school, work, culture, and so on. During his time, he saw developmental psychology as only studying individual influences on development in unnatural settings; in his own words, developmental psychology was, "the science of strange behavior of children in strange situations with strange adults for the briefest possible periods of time." It is from this vantage point that Bronfenbrenner conceives his theory of human development, the ecological systems theory. His theory states that there are many different levels of environmental influences that can affect a child's development, starting from people and institutions immediately surrounding the individual to nationwide cultural forces. He later accounted for the influence of time, such as specific events and changes in culture over time, by adding the chronosystem to the theory. Furthermore, he eventually renamed his theory the bioecological model to recognize the importance of biological processes in development. However, he only recognized biology as producing a person's potential, with this potential being realized or not via environmental and social forces.

Head Start

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Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Urie Bronfenbrenner

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Urie Bronfenbrenner claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In astronomy, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Urie Bronfenbrenner before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Urie Bronfenbrenner ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Urie Bronfenbrenner

In research: Urie Bronfenbrenner appears in astronomy research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Urie Bronfenbrenner in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Urie Bronfenbrenner is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1917 births, 2005 deaths, 20th-century American Jews, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Urie Bronfenbrenner outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Urie Bronfenbrenner in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Urie Bronfenbrenner means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Urie Bronfenbrenner out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Urie Bronfenbrenner in simple terms?

Why does Urie Bronfenbrenner matter?

Because it connects several astronomy ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Urie Bronfenbrenner?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Urie Bronfenbrenner.