What Is Educational Psychology?
Introduction to educational psychology
Educational psychology involves the study of how people learn, including teaching methods, instructional processes, and individual differences in learning. The goal is to understand how people learn and retain new information. This branch of psychology involves not just the learning process of early childhood and adolescence but includes the social, emotional, and cognitive processes that are involved in learning throughout the entire lifespan. The field of educational psychology incorporates a number of other disciplines, including developmental psychology, behavioral psychology, and cognitive psychology.
What Educational psychologists study learners and learning contexts both within and beyond traditional classrooms and evaluate ways in which factors such as age, culture, gender, and physical and social environments influence human learning. They leverage educational theory and practice based on the latest research related to human development to understand the emotional, cognitive, and social aspects of human learning. Educational psychology can influence programs, curricula, and lesson development, as well as classroom management approaches. For example, educators can use concepts from educational psychology to understand and address the ways rapidly changing technologies both help and harm their students' learning. In addition, educational psychologists play an important role in educating teachers, parents, and administrators about best practices for learners who struggle with conventional education methods.
As psychologists, these professionals often work directly with children and in collaboration with parents and teachers to improve a child's learning outcomes. However, educational psychologists can also pursue careers as researchers, consultants, and teachers in a variety of contexts, including schools, community organizations, government research centers, and learning centers.
Areas of Educational Psychology
Educational psychology is the applied branch of psychology. It consist of the application of psychological principles and techniques to human behavior in educational situations to the development of educational strategies and programs, problems and solutions.
There are three focal areas of educational psychology:
The Learners
The Learning Process
The Learning Situation
Methods of educational psychology
Different types of techniques are used by researchers to collect data and conduct research studies. With the increasing use of educational technology in education, psychology and other social sciences, new research strategies are evolved.
Following are the important methods and techniques of collecting data are:
Introspection
Observation
Clinical method
Case study
Survey or differential methods
Scientific or experimental method
Why should we Study Educational Psychology?
Educational Psychology helps teacher to know that how learning takes place.
It enables a teacher that how learning process should be initiated, how to motivate, how to memorize or learn.
It helps teachers to guide the students in right direction in order to canalized student’s abilities in right direction.
It informs a teacher, about the nature of the learners and his potentialities.
It helps a teacher to develop a student personality because the whole educational process is for student’s personality development.
It helps a teacher to adjust his methodologies of learning to the nature / demand of the learner.
It enables a teacher to know the problems of individual differences and treat every student on his / her merit.
It helps a teacher that how to solve the learning problems of a student.
It helps a teacher that how to evaluate a students that whether the purpose of teaching & learning has been achieved.
Major Perspectives in Educational Psychology
As with other areas of psychology, researchers within educational psychology tend to take on different perspectives when considering a problem. These perspectives focus on specific factors that influence how a person learns, including learned behaviors, cognition, experiences, and more.
The Behavioral Perspective
This perspective suggests that all behaviors are learned through conditioning. Psychologists who take this perspective rely firmly on the principles of operant conditioning to explain how learning happens.
For example, teachers might reward learning by giving students tokens that can be exchanged for desirable items such as candy or toys. The behavioral perspective operates on the theory that students will learn when rewarded for "good" behavior and punished for "bad" behavior.
While such methods can be useful in some cases, the behavioral approach has been criticized for failing to account for such things as attitudes, emotions, and intrinsic motivations for learning.
The Developmental Perspective
This focuses on how children acquire new skills and knowledge as they develop.2 Jean Piaget's famous stages of cognitive development are one example of an important developmental theory looking at how children grow intellectually.
By understanding how children think at different stages of development, educational psychologists can better understand what children are capable of at each point of their growth. This can help educators create instructional methods and materials best aimed at certain age groups.
The Cognitive Perspective
The cognitive approach has become much more widespread in recent decades, mainly because it accounts for how things such as memories, beliefs, emotions, and motivations contribute to the learning process.
This theory supports the idea that a person learns as a result of their own motivation, not as a result of external rewards.
Cognitive psychology aims to understand how people think, learn, remember, and process information.
Educational psychologists who take a cognitive perspective are interested in understanding how kids become motivated to learn, how they remember the things that they learn, and how they solve problems, among other things.
The Constructivist Approach
One of the most recent learning theories, this perspective focuses on how we actively construct our knowledge of the world.5 Constructivism tends to account more for the social and cultural influences that impact how we learn.
Those who take the constructivist approach believe that what a person already knows is the biggest influence on how they learn new information. This means that new knowledge can only be added on to and understood in terms of existing knowledge.
This perspective is heavily influenced by the work of psychologist Lev Vygotsky, who proposed ideas such as the zone of proximal development and instructional scaffolding.
Experiential Perspective
This perspective emphasizes that a person's own life experiences influence how they understand new information.6 This method is similar to constructivist and cognitive perspectives in that it takes into consideration the experiences, thoughts, and feelings of the learner.
This method allows someone to find personal meaning in what they learn instead of feeling that the information doesn't apply to them.
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