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 of learning 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 comprehension 2. 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 environmental events (stimuli). Skinners radical belief that all human behaviour, including learning, was dependent on reactions to the environment learning 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.