EDUCATIONAL

PSYCHOLOGY
Nature and Scope
 What is Educational Psychology?

Education is defined as the profession that

develops, applies and researches methods of
teaching and learning in schools

 Psychology is defined as the profession that

studies human behaviour.
 Educational psychology
• deals with a range of human behaviour involved in the
educational process including human development,
learning, memory, motivation and the evaluation of
learning.
• Thus, Educational Psychology concerned primarily with
understanding the processes of teaching and learning
that take place within formal environments and
developing ways of improving those methods. It covers
important topics like learning theories; teaching
methods; motivation; cognitive, emotional, and moral
development; and parent-child relationships
 NATURE OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY

Educational Psychology is……

 SCIENCE
 NATURAL SCIENCE
 SOCIAL SCIENCE
POSITIVE SCIENCE
 APPLIED SCIENCE
 DEVELOPING OR GROWING SCIENCE
 SCOPE OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY

 The Learner
 The Learning Experiences
 Learning Process
 Learning Situations or Environment
 The Teacher
 The joys of teaching
• to witness the diversity of growth in young
people, and their joy in learning
• • to encourage lifelong learning—both for
yourself and for others
• • to experience the challenge of devising and
doing interesting, exciting activities for the
young
Are there also challenges to teaching?
• when you call attention to the wonderful
immensity of an area of knowledge, you might
accidentally discourage a student by implying
that the student can never learn “enough”.
• The complexity of designing and
implementing instruction can sometimes
seem overwhelming, instead of satisfying.
• Unexpected events in your classroom can
become chaos rather than an attractive
novelty.
 #teachingtoday
• increased diversity: there are more differences among students than there used to be.
Diversity has made teaching more fulfilling as a career, but also made more challenging in
certain respects.
• increased instructional technology: classrooms, schools, and students use computers more
often today than in the past for research, writing, communicating, and keeping records.
Technology has created new ways for students to learn (for example, this textbook would not
be possible without Internet technology!). It has also altered how teachers can teach most
effectively, and even raised issues about what constitutes “true” teaching and learning.
• greater accountability in education: both the public and educators themselves pay more
attention than in the past to how to assess (or provide evidence for) learning and good
quality teaching. The attention has increased the importance of education to the public (a
good thing) and improved education for some students. But it has also created new
constraints on what teachers teach and what students learn.
• increased professionalism of teachers: Now more than ever, teachers are able to assess the
quality of their own work as well as that of colleagues, and to take steps to improve it when
necessary. Professionalism improves teaching, but by creating higher standards of practice it
also creates greater worries about whether particular teachers and schools are “good
enough”.
What is learning?
• Learning is generally defined as relatively
permanent changes in behavior, skills, knowledge,
or attitudes resulting from identifiable
psychological or social experiences.
• Learning usually involves a change in behaviour
(knowledge, skill, attitude) which lasts for some
time and is the result of experience.
• "Learning is an enduring change in behaviour, or
in the capacity to behave in a given fashion,
which results from practice or other forms of
experience."
 How do people learn?

• behavioural (classic and operant

conditioning),
• cognitive and
• eclectic (combinations of behavioural and
cognitive theories).
 THEORIES OF COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

• JEAN PIAGET- Swiss Psychologist. His theory provided

many central concepts in the field of developmental
psychology and concerned the growth of intelligence,
which for Piaget, meant the ability to more accurately
represent the world and perform logical operations on
representation of concepts grounded in the world.
• The theory concern s the emergence and acquisition of
schemata-schemes of how one perceives the world—in
“developmental stages”, times when children are
acquiring new ways of mentally representing
information.
 SENSORIMOTOR PERIOD (0-2 YEARS)
• Infants are born with a set of congenital reflexes,
according to Piaget, in addition to a drive to explore
their world. The initial schemas are formed through
differentiation of the congenital reflexes:
• Reflex schema stage- the first sub-stage, occurs from
birth to six weeks and is associated primarily with the
development of reflexes. 3 primary reflexes are
described: sucking of objects in the mouth, following
moving or interesting objects with the eyes, and
closing of the hand when an object makes contact with
the palm.
• Primary circular reaction phase- seco0nd sub stage,
occurs from six weeks to four months and is associated
primarily with the development of habits. Repeating of
an action involving only one’s own body begins.
• Secondary circular reaction phase- third sub stage,
occurs from four to nine months and is associated
primarily with the development of coordination
between vision and apprehension. 3 new abilities
occur at this stage: intentional grasping for a desired
object, often to the amusement of friends, family,
younger and older siblings, grandparents. Secondary
circular reactions or the repetition of an action
involving an external object begin. Differentiation
between means also occurs. This is perhaps one of the
most important stages of a child’s growth as it signifies
the dawn of logic.
• Coordination of secondary circular reaction stage- the
fourth sub stage, occurs from nine to twelve months, is
when Piaget thought that object permanence
developed. It is also associated primarily with the
development of logic and coordination between means
and the ends.
• Tertiary circular reaction phase- fifth sub stage, occurs
from twelve to eighteen months and is associated
primarily with the discovery of new means to meet
goals.
• Beginnings of symbolic representation- associated
primarily with the beginnings of insight, or true
creativity. In this stage the trial and error application of
schemata, which was observable during the previous
stage, occurs internally, resulting in the sudden
appearance of new effective behaviors.
 PREOPERATIONAL STAGE (2-7 YEARS OLD)

• By observing sequences of play, Piaget was

able to demonstrate that towards the end of
the second year a qualititatively new kind of
psychological functioning occurs.
• the hallmark of the preoperational stage is
sparse and logically inadequate mental
operations.
i. Symbolic functioning- characterized by the use
of mental symbols, words, or pictures, which the
child uses to represent something which is not
physically present.
ii. Centration- characterized by a child focusing
or attending to only one aspect of a stimulus or
situation.
iii. Intuitive thought- occurs when the child is
able to believe in something without knowing
why she or he believes in it.
iv. Egocentrism- a version of centration, this
denotes a tendency of a child to only think from
her or his own point of view.
• v. Inability to conserve- through Piaget's
conservation experiments (conservation of
mass, volume and number). He concluded
that children in the preoperational stage lack
perception of conservation of mass, volume
and number after the original form has
changed.
• vi. Animism- the child believes that inanimate
objects have “lifelike” qualities and are
capable of action.
 CONCRETE OPERATIONAL STAGE (7-11 YEARS OLD)

• Characterized by the appropriate use of logic.

a. seriation- the ability to arrange objects in
order according to size, shape, or any other
characteristics.
b. classification-the ability to name and identify
sets of objects according to appearance, size, or
other characteristics, including the idea that one
set objects can include another.
c. decentering- where the hild takes into
account multiple aspects of problem to solve it.
e. reversibility- where the child understads that
numbers or objects can be changed, the
returned to their original state.
d. conservation- understanding that quantity,
length or number of items is unrelated to the
arrangement or appearance of the object or
items.
f. elimination of egocentrism- the ability to view
things from another's perspective.
 FORMAL OPERATIONAL PERIOD (11
YEARS OLD TO ADULTHOOD)
• The formal operational period is the fourth
and final of the periods of cognitive
development in Piaget's theory. It is
characterized by acquisition of the ability to
think abstractly, reason logically, and draw
conclusions from the information available.
During this stage the young adult is able to
understand such things as love, logical proofs,
and values.
 SOCIOCULTURAL THEORY
• LEV SEMENOVICH VYGOTSKY- psychologist, was
born in 1896 in Orsha, Belarus. Vygostky was
tutored privately by Solomon Ashpiz and graduated
from Moscow University in 1917. Later, he attented
the Institute of Psychology in Moscow , where he
worked extensively on ideas about cognitive
development, particularly the relationship between
language and thinking. His writings emphasized the
roles of historical, cultural, and social factors in
cognition and argued that language was the most
important symbollic tool provided by society.
• He began studying learning and development
to improve his own teaching. He went on to
write about language and thought, the
psychology of art, learning and development,
and educating students with special needs.
 THE SOCIAL SOURCES OF INDIVIDUAL
THINKING
• Vygotsky assumed that every function in a
child's cultural development appears twice:
first, on the social level and later on the
individual level; first between people
(interpsychological) and then inside the child
(intrapsychological). This applies equally to
voluntary attention, to logical memory, and to
the formation of concepts. All the higher
functions originate as actual relations
between human individuals.
• Higher mental processes, such as directing
your own attention and thinking through
problems, first are co-constructed during
shared activities between the child and
another person. Then these co-constructed
processes are internalized by the child and
become part of that child's cognitive
development. So, for Vygotsky, social
interaction was more than influence; it was
the origin of higher mental processes such as
problem solving.
A six year old has lost a toy and asks her father
for help. The father asks her where she last saw
the toy; the child says “I can't remember”. He
asks a series of questions-did you have it in your
room? Outside? Next door? To each question,
the child answers, “no”. When he says “in the
car?” she says “I think so” and goes to retrieve
the toy.

WHO REMEMBERED?
 CULTURAL TOOLS AND COGNITIVE
DEVELOPMENT
• Vygostky believed that cultural tools and psychological tools play very important
roles in cognitive development.
• the use of technical tools such as calculators and spell checkers has been
somewhat controversial in education.
• Vygostky believed that all higher-order mental processes such as reasoning and
problem solving are mediated by psychological tools. These tools allow children to
transform their thinking by enabling them to gain greater and greater mastery of
their own cognitive processes; they advance their own development as they use
the tools.
• Children begin to develop a “cultural tool kit” to make sense of and learn about
their world. The kit is filled with technical tools such as graphing calculators or
rulers directed toward the external world and psychological tools for acting
mentally such as concepts, problem solving strategies. Children do not just receive
tools, however. They transform the tools as they construct th own
represantations, symbols, patterns and understandings. These understanding are
gradually changed as the children continue to engage in social activities and try to
make sense of their world.
• In Vygotsky's theory, language is the most important symbol system in the tool kit,
and it is the one that helps to fill the kit with other tools.
• language is critical for cognitive development
because it provides a way to express ideas and
ask questions, the categories and concepts for
thinking, and the links between the past and
the future.
• he believed that “thinking depends on speech,
on the means of thinking and on the child's
socio-cultural experience”. And Vygotsky
believed that language in the form of private
speech guides cognitive development.
 THE ZONE OF PROXIMAL
DEVELOPMENT
• at any given point in development, a child is on the
verge of solving certain problems-”processes that
have not matured at the time but are i aperiod of
maturation”. The child just needs some structure,
demonstrations, clues, reminders, help with
remembering details or steps, encouragement to
keep trying, and so on.
• The ZPD is the area between the child's current
performance and the level of performance that
the child could achieve with adult guidance or by
working with “a more fully developed child”
 Behaviorism
• is a perspective on learning that focuses on
changes in individuals’ observable behaviors—
changes in what people say or do.
• John B. Watson and Edward Thorndike (1912)
• The elements of behavior are conditional
reflexes; not instinct or inborn tendencies.
• It is also focused on stimulus-response-
connection, that is, learning is more effective
if the stimulus-response connection is strong.
In classrooms, behaviorism is most useful for
identifying relationships between specific
actions by a student and the immediate
precursors and consequences of the actions. It
is less useful for understanding changes in
students’ thinking; for this purpose we need a
more cognitive (or thinking-oriented) theory,
Classical Conditioning
• Before Conditioning:
• (UCS) Food→ Salivation (UR)
• (UCS) Bell→ No response (UR)
• During Conditioning:
• Bell + Food→ Salivation
• After Conditioning:
• (CS) Bell only→ Salivation (CR)
• As originally conceived, respondent conditioning
(sometimes also called classical conditioning) begins with
the involuntary responses to particular sights, sounds, or
other sensations.
• Children's classroom behaviours can sometimes be
explained by classical conditioning. The student who has a
particular love of a subject, for example, may have
developed this simply because that subject was always time-
tabled right after lunch time. Perhaps the student had a kind
teacher, and the subject taught became associated with the
feelings of pleasure the teacher gave.
• Much undesirable behaviour can also be a result of classical
conditioning. The child who dislikes mathematics may be
simply showing behaviour conditioned by an unpleasant
teacher who shamed or frightened the child. Fear of
attending school can result from a simple response
generalization, such as being punished for being late.
Operant conditioning
• focuses on how the effects of consequences
on behaviors.
• B. F. Skinner
• is based upon a reward, which is called a
reinforcement. Operant conditioning teaches
a set of behaviours through rewarding after
the behaviour has been performed.
• operant conditioning, the behaviour must be
displayed first, then rewarded. The behaviour
is voluntary, so the person operates on the
environment to produce the reward.
 two main types of reinforcement
• Positive reinforcement- refers to a desirable
or pleasant event
• Negative reinforcement- refers to an
undesirable or unpleasant event.
• Punishment- is when the consequences of a
behaviour are unpleasant.
 Schedules of reinforcement
Continuous reinforcement is when the
reinforcer is applied every time the behaviour
appears.
Intermittent reinforcement is applied at various
intervals, such as every second or fifth time
the behaviour appears.
• Behaviour modification- operant conditioning
is used systematically
• Social reinforcer of attention.