Contemporary Issues in Cognitive Developmental Psychology :: Papers

Contemporary Issues in Cognitive Developmental Psychology The stage in which a child learns is very important in psychology. Piaget, Vygotsky, and Bruner are the most popular psychologists who have contributed to developmental learning. The issue still among psychologists today is the debate on teaching, and how children should be taught. There is the, "talk and chalk" method where the teacher teaches the whole class interactively and the children can participate when asked to. Piaget believed in student centred learning and not group learning. The advantage of this method of teaching is that they are all going up a level at the same time; there might be a few that fail to follow but the teacher can push them. Children can also start to interact with each other and get to know other people in their classroom. This could also reduce prejudice at a young age. If they work as a group they also learn as a group, but the downside of this is they may lose their sense of individuality. And as a group they may feel as, "one." If they were to do a practical there would be one child who would be the leader, which would not benefit to the other children. The other method of teaching is the individual/ group method. This is where Piaget's individual learning programme enters. Vygotsky's spiral curriculum would be useful in this method since it opens complex ideas so that they can be presented at simplified levels. Each student should find their zone of actual development and then the teacher should be the outer circle so they can go to their zone of proximal development. The disadvantage of this is the cost of student centred learning. At the moment we have whole class teaching and there are the ups and downs of that but if the individual learning took place it will improve due to the individuals needs being noticed and processed. Individual learning can also be structured by scaffolding so the child's attempt to understand new ideas will be done with even more