Theory of Educational Psychology: An Introduction
Educational psychologists examine how variables including age, culture, gender, and the physical and social environments affect how people learn in both traditional classroom settings and those outside of them. To comprehend the emotional, cognitive, and social elements of human learning, they make use of educational theory and practise based on the most recent research in the field of human development.Educational psychology can influence programs, curricula, and lesson development, as well as classroom management approaches. In addition, educational psychologists play an important role in educating teachers, parents or guardians, and administrators about best practices for learners who struggle with conventional education methods.
Key Theories in Education Psychology
Although educational psychology programmes cover a wide range of theories, many experts agree that the behaviourism, cognitivism, constructivism, experientialism, and social contextual learning theories represent the five main schools of thought. The important theorists, definition, timeline, guiding principles, and applications for each of these five major theoretical groups are listed below, along with a summary of each group.
Social and Contextual
First emerging in the late 20th century, social and contextual learning theories challenge the individual-focused approaches evident in both constructivism and cognitivism. Social and contextual theories are influenced by anthropological and ethnographic research and emphasize the ways environment and social contexts shape one’s learning.Maxwell adds, “It’s a fascinating branch of psychology that studies how social and cultural factors influence our behavior, thoughts, and emotions.
Basically, social and contextual psychology looks at how the meaning of things, like words, emotions, and events, depend on the context they occur in.It also explores how we learn by observing others and being part of a group, and how that can affect our development. This can include working with colleagues who have different levels of experience, and how we can all stimulate each other’s growth.
Experientialism
This school of thought emerged in the 1970s out of the influence of the learner-centered and interactive principles of constructivism and social learning theories. Experiential learning theories identify meaningful everyday experience as the most central factor in increasing a learner’s knowledge and understanding, as well as transforming their behaviour.Maxwell says, “In educational psychology, experientialism is applied when teachers get students to work on real-world problems through project-based learning, or when students are involved in immersive activities that engage more than just our thinking-brains, e.g., flight simulators, school kitchens or workshops for tech classes, and role-playing exercises to practice dealing with situations before really being in them like debating.”
Rejecting instructor-centric approaches, experientialism argues that one person cannot effectively impart knowledge directly to another person; people must learn for themselves. A teacher can facilitate the learning process by engaging students through an experience, but they cannot control exactly what students learn from that experience. Experientialists argue that learners become less receptive when they are afraid, as a result, this view encourages teachers to create nonthreatening learning environments where learners can experience and experiment freely.Contemporary experientialists are interested in how a learner’s engagement and testing of new skills or concepts influences their learning environment, which creates a larger feedback loop that shapes the world in which we live.
Constructivism
Constructivism gained notoriety in the 1930s-40s and enjoyed a resurgence in the 1970s-80s. This view challenges both the behaviorist notion of the learner as a blank slate and the cognitivist notion of learning as the acquisition of objective information from an expert.
This school of thought suggests that learners create their own subjective information by interpreting their world and restructuring their thinking. Constructivists agree that learners create knowledge rather than passively receiving it, and that preexisting knowledge plays a crucial role in their learning. However, two differing strands of constructivism bear mentioning.Cognitive constructivism agrees that learners construct rather than receive information, but it is interested in the cognitive processing involved in knowledge construction. “Your perspectives and ideas about the world aren’t just what you’ve picked up, like an empty tank slowly being filled; but rather you’re building your own house of knowledge and what you explicitly learn is only some of the bricks,” Maxwell says.
Cognitivism
Cognitive Psychology emerged in the 1950s and became dominant in the 1960s. Departing from the comparative emphasis of behaviourists, cognitivists see human beings as rational creatures quite different from animals. Consequently, cognitive theory explores the complexities of the human mind as it processes information.It views behaviour as a result of one’s thoughts. Cognitive psychology understands knowledge acquisition schematically and symbolically. It posits learning as the process of changing a learner’s mental model or schematic understanding of knowledge.
In this view, human behaviour reflects internal processing of the human mind, rather than simply a conditioned response to external stimuli. Learning involves the integration of information into a stored and usable body of knowledge.Cognitivism emphasises the importance of an expert in transmitting accurate information, yet sees a learner’s success or failure in absorbing this information as largely dependent upon the learner’s mental capacity, motivation, beliefs, and effort.
Behaviorism
Behaviorist learning theories first emerged in the late 19th century from the work of Edward Thorndike and Ivan Pavlov. They were popularized during the first half of the 20th century through the work of John B. Watson, B.F. Skinner, and others.
Behaviorism defines learning as observable behavioral change that occurs in response to environmental stimuli. Maxwell explains, “Behaviorism suggests we do what we do because of what happens around us environmentally, not because of what’s inside us innately.”
Behaviorism relies on the prediction or analysis of behavior based on causal stimuli, while education uses the process of positive and negative reinforcement to encourage or discourage behaviors. This school of thought emphasizes behavior’s learned causes over its biological one; therefore, behaviorism deeply values the ability of education to shape individuals.
Behaviorist learning theory distinguishes between classical and operative conditioning. The former involves natural responses to environmental stimuli, while the latter involves the reinforcement of a response to stimuli. Behaviorist theories ascribe to a reductionist approach, which dictates that breaking behavior down into parts is the best way to understand it. Other schools of thought critique behaviorism for underemphasizing biological and unconscious factors, denying free will, equating humans with animals, and overlooking internal learning processes or types of learning that occur without reinforcement.