Introduction to educational psychology

Educational psychology is the study of how humans learn in educational settings, the effectiveness of educational treatments, the psychology of teaching, and the social psychology of schools as organizations. Although the terms "educational psychology" and "school psychology" are often used interchangeably, researchers and theorists are likely to be identified as educational psychologists, whereas practitioners in schools or school-related settings are identified as school psychologists. Educational psychology is concerned with the processes of educational attainment among the general population and sub-populations such as gifted children and those subject to specific disabilities.

Educational psychology can in part be understood through its relationship with other disciplines. It is informed primarily by psychology, bearing a relationship to that discipline analogous to the relationship between medicine and biology. Educational psychology in turn informs a wide range of specialities within educational studies, including instructional design, educational technology, curriculum development, organizational learning, special education and classroom management. Educational psychology both draws from and contributes to cognitive science and the learning sciences. In universities, departments of educational psychology are usually housed within faculties of education, possibly accounting for the lack of representation of educational psychology content in introductory psychology textbooks (Lucas, Blazek, & Raley, 2005).

Social, moral and cognitive development
To understand the characteristics of learners in childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and old age, educational psychology develops and applies theories of human development. Often cast as stages through which people pass as they mature, developmental theories describe changes in mental abilities (cognition), social roles, moral reasoning, and beliefs about the nature of knowledge.

For example, educational psychologists have researched the instructional applicability of Jean Piaget's theory of development, according to which children mature through four stages of cognitive capability. Piaget hypothesized that children are not capable of abstract logical thought until they are older than about 11 years, and therefore younger children need to be taught using concrete objects and examples. Researchers have found that transitions, such as from concrete to abstract logical thought, do not occur at the same time in all domains. A child may be able to think abstractly about mathematics, but remain limited to concrete thought when reasoning about human relationships. Perhaps Piaget's most enduring contribution is his insight that people actively construct their understanding through a self-regulatory process.

Piaget proposed a developmental theory of moral reasoning in which children progress from a naive understanding of morality based on behavior and outcomes to a more advanced understanding based on intentions. Piaget's views of moral development were elaborated by Kohlberg into a stage theory of moral development. There is evidence that the moral reasoning described in stage theories is not sufficient to account for moral behavior. For example, other factors such as modeling (as described by the social cognitive theory of morality) are required to explain bullying.

Developmental theories are sometimes presented, not as shifts between qualitatively different stages, but as gradual increments on separate dimensions. Development of epistemological beliefs (beliefs about knowledge) have been described in terms gradual changes in people's belief in: certainty and permanence of knowledge, fixedness of ability, and credibility of authorities such as teachers and experts. People develop more sophisticated beliefs about knowledge as they gain in education and maturity (Cano, 2005).

Individual differences and disabilities


Each person has an individual profile of characteristics, abilities and challenges that result from learning and development. These manifest as individual differences in intelligence, creativity, cognitive style, motivation, and the capacity to process information, communicate, and relate to others. The most prevalent disabilities found among school age children are attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), learning disability, dyslexia, and speech disorder. Less common disabilities include mental retardation, autism, hearing impairment, cerebral palsy, epilepsy, and blindness.

Although theories of intelligence have been discussed by philosophers since Plato, intelligence testing is an invention of educational psychology, and is coincident with the development of that discipline. Continuing debates about the nature of intelligence revolve on whether intelligence can be characterized by a single factor (Spearman's general intelligence), multiple factors (as in Sternberg's triarchic theory of intelligence and Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences), or whether it can be measured at all. In practice, standardized instruments such as the Stanford-Binet IQ test are widely used in economically developed countries to identify children in need of individualized educational treatment. Children classified as gifted are often provided with accelerated or enriched programs. Children identified with specific deficits may be provided with education in specific skills such as phonological awareness.

Learning and cognition
Two fundamental assumptions that underly formal education systems are that students (a) retain knowledge and skills they acquire in school, and (b) can apply them in situations outside the classroom. But are these assumptions accurate? Research has found that, even when students report not using the knowledge acquired in school, a considerable portion is retained for many years and long term retention is strongly dependent on the initial level of mastery (Semb & Ellis, 1994). When tested 10 years later, university students who took a child development course and attained high grades showed average retention scores of about 30%, whereas those who obtained moderate or lower grades showed average retention scores of about 20% (Ellis, Semb, & Cole, 1998). There is much less consensus on the crucial question of how much knowledge acquired in school transfers to tasks encountered outside formal educational settings. Some psychologists claim that research evidence for this type of far transfer is scarce (Perkins & Grotzer, 1997; Detterman, 1993), while others claim there is abundent evidence of far transfer in specific domains (e.g., Halpern, 1998).

Several perspectives have been established within which the theories of learning used in educational psychology are formed and contested. These include Behaviorism, Cognitivism, Social Cognitivism, and Constructivism. This section summarizes how educational psychology has researched and applied theories within each of these perspectives.

Behavioral perspective
Applied behavior analysis, a set of techniques based on the behavioral principles of operant conditioning, is effective in a range of educational settings (Alberto & Troutman, 2003). For example, teachers can improve student behavior by systematically rewarding students who follow classroom rules with praise, stars, or tokens exchangable for sundry items (McGoey & DuPaul, 2003; Theodore, Bray, Kehle, & Jensen, 2001). However, the use of rewards in education has been criticized by proponents of self-determination theory, who claim that rewards undermine intrinsic motivation. There is evidence that tangible rewards decrease intrinsic motivation in specific situations, such as when the student already has a high level of intrinsic motivation to perform the goal behavior (Lepper, Greene, & Nisbett, 1973). But the results showing detrimental effects are counterbalanced by evidence that, in other situations, such as when rewards are given for attaining a gradually increasing standard of performance, rewards enhance intrinsic motivation (Cameron, Pierce, Banko, & Gear, 2005).

Cognitive perspective
Among current educational psychologists, the cognitive perspective is more widely held than the behavioral perspective perhaps because it flexibly admits causally related mental constructs such as traits, beliefs, memories, motivations and emotions. Cognitive theories posit memory structures that are thought to determine how information is perceived, processed, stored, retrieved and forgotten. Among the memory structures theorized by cognitive psychologists are separate but linked visual and verbal systems described by Paivio's dual coding theory. Educational psychologists have used dual coding theory and cognitive load theory to explain how people learn from multimedia presentations (Mayer, 2003).

The spaced learning effect, a cognitive phenomenon strongly supported by psychological research, has broad applicability within education (Dempster, 1989). For example, students have been found to perform better on a test of knowledge about a text passage when when a second reading of the passage is delayed rather than immediate (Krug, Davis & Glover, 1990, see figure). Educational psychology research has confirmed the applicability to education of other findings from cognitive psychology, such as the benefits of using mnemonics for immediate and delayed retention of information (Carney & Levin, 2000).

Problem solving, regarded by many cognitive psychologists as fundamental to learning, is an important research topic in educational psychology. A student is thought to interpret a problem by assigning it to a problem schema held as prior knowledge. When the problem is assigned to the wrong schema, the student's attention is subsequently directed away from features of the problem that are inconsistent with the assigned schema (Kalyuga, Chandler, Tuovnen & Sweller, 2001). The critical step of finding a mapping between the problem and a pre-existing schema is often cited as supporting the centrality of analogical thinking to problem solving.

Social cognitive theory
Social cognitive theory is a highly influential fusion of behavioral, cognitive and social elements that was initially developed by educational psychologist Albert Bandura. In its earlier, neo-behavioral incarnation called social learning theory, Bandura emphasized the process of observational learning in which a learner's behavior changes as a result of observing others' behavior and its consequences. The theory identified several factors that determine whether observing a model will affect behavioral or cognitive change. These factors include the learner's developmental status, the perceived prestige and competence of the model, the consequences received by the model, the relevance of the model's behaviors and consequences to the learner's goals, and the learner's self-efficacy. The concept of self-efficacy, which played an important role in later developments of the theory, refers to the learner's belief in his or her ability to perform the modeled behavior.

An experiment by Schunk and Hanson (1985), studying grade 2 students who had previously experienced difficulty in learning subtraction, illustrates the type of research stimulated by social learning theory. One group of students observed a subtraction demonstration by a teacher and then participated in an instructional program on subtraction. A second group observed other grade 2 students performing the same subtraction procedures and then partipated in the same instructional program. The students who observed peer models scored higher on a subtraction post-test and also reported greater confidence in their subtraction ability. The results were interpreted as supporting the hypothesis that perceived similarity of the model to the learner increases self-efficacy, leading to more effective learning of modeled behavior. It is supposed that peer modeling is particularly effective for students who have low self-efficacy.

Over the last decade, much research activity in educational psychology has focused on developing theories of self-regulated learning (SRL) and metacognition. These theories work from the central premise that effective learners are active agents who construct knowledge by setting goals, analysing tasks, planning strategies and monitoring their understanding. Research has indicated that learners' who are better at goal setting and self-monitoring tend to have greater intrinsic task interest and self-efficacy (Zimmerman, 1998); and that teaching learning strategies can increase academic achievement (Hattie, Biggs & Purdie, 1996).

Constructivist perspective
Constructivism refers to a category of learning theories in which emphasis is placed on the agency and prior knowledge of the learner, and often on the social and cultural determinants of the learning process. Educational psychologists distinguish individual (or psychological) constructivism, identified with Piaget's learning theory, from social constructivism. A dominant influence on the latter type is Lev Vygotsky's work on sociocultural learning, describing how interactions with adults, more capable peers, and cognitive tools are internalized to form mental constructs. Elaborating on Vygotsky's theory, Jerome Bruner and other educational psychologists developed the important concept of instructional scaffolding, in which the social or information environment offers supports for learning that are gradually withdrawn as they become internalized.

Vygotsky's version of constructivist theory has led to the view that behavior, skills, attitudes and beliefs are inherently situated, that is, bound to a specific sociocultural setting. According to this view, the learner is enculturated through social interactions within a community of practice. The social constructivist view of learning has spawned approaches to teaching and learning such as cognitive apprenticeship, in which the tacit components of a complex skill are made explicit through conversational interactions occurring between expert and novice in the setting in which the skill is embedded (Collins, Brown & Newman, 1989).

Motivation
Motivation is an internal state that arouses, guides and sustains behavior. Educational psychology research on motivation is concerned with the volition or will that students bring to a task, their level of interest and intrinsic motivation, the personally held goals that guide their behavior, and their belief about the causes of their success or failure.

A form of attribution theory developed by Bernard Weiner describes how students' beliefs about the causes of academic success or failure affect their emotions and motivations (Weiner, 2000). For example, when students attribute failure to lack of ability, and ability is perceived as uncontrollable, they experience the emotions of shame and embarrassment and consequently decrease effort and show poorer performance. In contrast, when students attribute failure to lack of effort, and effort is perceived as controllable, they experience the emotion of guilt and consequently increase effort and show improved performance.

Motivational theories also explain how learners' goals affect the way that they engage with academic tasks (Elliot, 1999). Those who have mastery goals strive to increase their ability and knowledge. Those who have performance approach goals strive for high grades and seek opportunities to demonstrate their abilities. Those who have performance avoidance goals are driven by fear of failure and avoid situations where their abilities are exposed. Research has found that mastery goals are associated with many positive outcomes such as persistence in the face of failure, preference for challenging tasks, creativity and intrinsic motivation. Performance avoidance goals are associated with negative outcomes such as poor concentration while studying, disorganized studying, less self-regulation, shallow information processing and test anxiety. Performance approach goals are associated with positive outcomes, and some negative outcomes such as an unwillingness to seek help and shallow information processing.

Research methods
The research methods used in educational psychology tend to be drawn from psychology and other social sciences. There is also a history of significant methodological innovation by educational psychologists, or psychologists investigating educational problems. Research methods address problems in both research design and data analysis. Research design informs the planning of experiments and observational studies to ensure that their results have internal, external and ecological validity. Data analysis encompasses methods for processing both quantitive (numerical) and qualitative (non-numerical) research data. Although, historically, the use of quantitative methods was often considered an essential mark of scholarship, modern educational psychology research uses both quantitative and qualitative methods.

Perhaps first among the important methodological innovations of educational psychology was the development and application factor analysis by Charles Spearman.

Meta-analysis, the combination of individual research results to produce a quantitative literature review, is another methodological innovation with a close association to educational psychology. In a meta-analysis, effect sizes that represent, for example, the differences between treatment groups in a set of similar experiments, are averaged to obtain a single aggregate value representing the best estimate of the effect of treatment (Lipsey & Wilson, 2001). Although early versions of meta-analysis are found in work by Karl Pearson, Gene Glass (1976) published the first application of modern meta-analytic techniques and triggered their broad application across the social and biomedical sciences. Today, meta-analysis is among the most common types of literature review found in educational psychology research.


 * reliability
 * Lee Cronbach

Educational psychology for teaching
Research on classroom management and pedagogy is conducted to guide teaching practice and form a foundation for teacher education programs. The goals of classroom management are to create an environment conducive to learning and to develop students' self-management skills. More specifically, classroom management strives to create positive teacher-student and peer relationships, manage student groups to sustain on-task behavior, and use counselling and other psychological methods to aid students who present persistent psychosocial problems (Emmer & Stough, 2001).


 * Special education
 * Lesson plan

Educational psychology for instructional design and technology


In task analysis, often regarded as a behavioral approach to designing learning materials and activities, complex performance goals are analyzed into simpler, subsidiary objectives that are arranged in an instructional sequence. Behavioral objectives include descriptions of: (1) the target behavior; (2) the conditions under which the target behavior is to be performed; and (3) the performance criteria (Mager, 1975). An example of a behavioral objective is: "The student will be able to read aloud from a list of common words with the '-tion' suffix, correctly pronouncing 90% of the listed words."
 * Instructional design
 * Cooperative learning
 * Educational technology
 * Mastery learning

History of educational psychology
Educational psychology cannot claim priority in the systematic analysis of educational processes. Philosophers of education such as Democritus, Quintilian, Vives and Comenius, had examined, classified and judged the methods of education centuries before the beginnings of psychology in the late 1800s. Instead, aspirations of the new discipline rested on the application of the scientific methods of observation and experimentation to educational problems. Even in the earliest years of the discipline, educational psychologists recognized the limitations of this new approach. In his famous series of lectures Talks to Teachers on Psychology, published in 1899 and now regarded as the first educational psychology textbook, the pioneering American psychologist William James commented that:

"Psychology is a science, and teaching is an art; and sciences never generate arts directly out of themselves. An intermediate inventive mind must make that application, by using its originality. (James, 1899/1983, p. 15)"


 * John Dewey
 * Charles Hubbard Judd
 * Alfred Binet
 * Edward Thorndike

Careers in educational psychology
A person may be considered an educational psychologist if he or she has completed a graduate degree in educational psychology or a closely related field. Universities establish educational psychology graduate programs in either psychology departments or, more commonly, faculties of education. Psychologists that work in a k-12 school setting are usually trained at either the masters or doctoral (PhD or EdD) level. In addition to conducting assessments, school psychologists provide services such as academic and behavioral intervention, counseling, teacher consultation, and crisis intervention.

In recent decades the participation of women as professional researchers in North American educational psychology has risen dramatically (Evans, Hsieh & Robinson, 2005). The percentage of female authors of peer-reviewed journal articles doubled from 1976 (24%) to 1995 (51%), and has since remained constant. Female membership on educational psychology journal editorial boards increased from 17% in 1976 to 47% in 2004. Over the same period, the proportion of chief editor positions held by women increased from 22% to 70%.

Influential educational psychologists and theorists

 * Albert Bandura 1925
 * Alfred Binet 1857-1911
 * Benjamin Bloom 1913-1999
 * Ann Brown 1943-1999
 * Jerome Bruner 1915
 * Lee Cronbach 1916-2001
 * John Dewey 1859-1952
 * Robert Gagné 1916-2002
 * William James 1842-1910
 * Maria Montessori 1870-1952
 * Jean Piaget 1896-1980
 * Herbert Simon 1916–2001
 * Burrhus Frederic Skinner 1904-1990
 * Charles Spearman 1863-1945
 * Lewis Terman 1877-1956
 * Edward L. Thorndike 1874-1949
 * Lev Semenovich Vygotsky 1896-1934

Research journals
Although not exhaustive, the table to the right lists peer-reviewed journals in educational psychology and related fields. The impact factor is the average number of citations per article in each journal.