Contemporary Issues in Cognitive Developmental Psychology The stage at which a child learns is very important in psychology. Piaget, Vygotsky and Bruner are the most popular psychologists who contributed to evolutionary learning. The issue is still under discussion Psychologists today are the debate about teaching and how children should be taught. There is the "talk and write" method where the teacher teaches the whole class interactively and the children can participate when required. Piaget believed in student-centered learning and not group learning. The advantage of this teaching method is that everyone levels up at the same time; there may be some who can't follow, but the teacher can push them. Children can also start to interact with each other and get to know other people in their class. This could also reduce prejudice at a young age. If they work in a group, they also learn as a group, but the disadvantage is that they may lose their sense of individuality. And as a group they can feel "one". If they were to do a practice, there would be one child who would be the leader, which would not benefit the other children. The other teaching method is the individual/group method. This is where Piaget's individual learning program comes into play. Vygotsky's spiral curriculum would be useful in this method as it opens up complex ideas so they can be presented at simplified levels. Each student should find their actual zone of development and then the teacher should be the outer circle so that they can go into their zone of proximal development. The downside of this is the cost of student-centered learning. At the moment we have whole class teaching and there are ups and downs, but if individual learning has taken place it will improve because individual needs are noticed and worked through. Individual learning can also be structured through scaffolding so that the child's attempt to understand new ideas will be made even more