7/28/2019 What is Educational Psychology - Lecture 1

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Week 1 Lecture 1

What is Educational Psychology?

Educational Psychology is a science, a branch of psychology that connects with education. It investigates the

instructors manipulation of the environment, the changes in the learners cognitive processes and knowledge

structures. The main goal of Educational Psychology is the understanding and improvement of education.

Educational Psychology investigates:

Teaching / Instruction: the arrangements of external events to activate and support the internal processes oflearning

Learning: Changes in the learners knowledge that arise from an experience.Scope of Educational Psychology:

Cognitive development Physical development Social and moral development Motivation Intelligence Cognitive processes

Learning theories Individual differences Culture Testing, measurement, assessment Classroom teaching

Cognitive psychology is a narrower field. It is the study of how people perceive, learn, remember and think about

information. It is followed from a general dissatisfaction with behaviourism. It has provided many powerful concepts:

1. Schemata: the idea that there are mental frameworks for comprehension2. Levels of processing: the notion that memory quality is a by-product of the kind of processing that

information receives.

3. Constructive memory: the view that knowledge is created by learner as they confront new situations.Associationism refers to how learning is developed from associating events and ideas together.

Behaviourism grew out of Associationism. It focuses on the relation between observable behaviour and environmentalevents (stimuli). Skinnersradical belief that all human behaviour, including learning, was dependent on reactions to the

environmentlearning by enforcement. Among the clearest formulations of behavioural principles include the trial

and error method (Hull, 1952).

Education today still reflects behaviourisms influence. For instance, behavioural theory is recognisable in approaches

such as the use of rewards, instructional objectives, and performance based accountability systems. Many psychologists

became increasingly frustrated as they attempted to use associationist theoretical frameworks and behavioural concepts

to describe the complexity of human memory, thinking, problem solving, decision making, and creativity. Trying to

explain this mental process within a stimulus/response framework seemed neither to satisfy nor to contribute greatly

to our understanding.

In the 1960s, it was argued that behaviourism was flawed because it was ignored internal mental processes how

people think. Many new findings in psychology, linguistics could not be explained.