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6 BCE
Plato and Aristotle
Plato and Aristotle discussed: the kinds of education appropriate to different kinds of people; the training of the body and the cultivation of psychomotor skills; the formation of good character; the possibilities and limits of moral education; the effects of music, poetry, and the other arts on the development of the individual; the role of the teacher; the relations between teacher and student; the means and methods of teaching. -
5 BCE
The Origins of Educational Psychology
In the fifth century B.C., Democritus, for example, wrote on the advantages conferred by schooling and the influence of the home on learning. -
1520
Juan Luis Vives
Juan Luis Vives wrote about the need for students to be evaluated on the basis of their own past accomplishments and not in comparison with other students, anticipating both the contemporary motivational theorists who eschew social comparisons and those
researchers who find the pernicious elements of norm-referenced testing to outweigh their advantages. -
Comenius
Comenius a humanist writing at the beginning of the modern era, also influenced both educational and sychoeducational thought. He wrote texts that were based on a developmental theory and in them inauguratedth e use of visual aids in instruction. Media and instructional research, a vibrant part of contemporary educational psychology, has its origins in the writing and textbook design of Comenius. -
Edward Lee Thorndike
E. L. Thorndike (1874-1947). Thorndike's views resulted in a major shift in psychology, he promoted the belief that science and only science would save education. Today, we would call the work commonsensical, systematic, and organized according to some reasonable principles of instruction. Today, we would probably
not call the work scientific but, rather, logical. This author especially promoted the idea that educational psychology must be scientifically based and firmly based on quantification. -
William James (1842-1910)
William James (1842-1910) can be considered the central figure in theestablishment of psychology in America. His was a psychology of humility, humor, and tolerance, particularly when it is compared with the psychology of Wundt -
G. Stanley Hall
G. Stanley Hall (1844-1924), founder of the child-study movement that James worried about, was a promoter of psychology in ways that James must have found distasteful. Hall was APA's organizer and its first president. Hall is credited with starting American developmental psychology in general and the child study movement in particular. Hall inquired into children's conceptions of nature, including animals, plants, and the solar system. -
John Dewey
The contributions of another American giant, John Dewey (1859-1952), were in three intertwined fields of study: philosophy, psychology, and pedagogy. He was against rote learning and drill and practice approaches. He was for what we would call today the development of thinking skills and against the attainment of decontextualized, inert forms of knowledge. He advocated allowing students to participate in the educational process. -
Educational Psychology at Mid-Century
A. D. Woodruff (1950) noted that educational psychology had no domain that was really its own to any greater extent than it belonged to others.
Wolfle (1947) added that if you were writing an educational psychology text you hadmto delete all references to subjects and insert the term pupil, whereas if you were writing a child psychology text you had to use the term children instead of subjects. -
Educational Psychology at Mid-Century
John B. Carroll, published his model of school learning , he also wrote about the discipline of educational psychology. Carroll said that until educational psychology provided evidence that it dealt with the real problems of schooling, "we shall continue to teach educational psychology to teachers with a mixture of piousoptimism and subdued embarrassment". -
Research on Teaching
From the 1960s on, we have developed a specialty area in research on teaching. From initial simple models of behavior using traditional
psychological methodology, we have moved to more sophisticated, cognitively oriented, naturalistic, contextually sensitive, participatory studies. Many in this field have recognized the importance of nowing intimately the goals and intentions of the teachers they study, in rder to make valid local inferences -
Instructional Psychology
A major area of educational psychology has been instructional psychology. Lauren Resnick (1981) noted that the problems of real-world instruction were beginning to guide the development of instructional psychology. For about 20 years the number of psychologists devoting attention to instructionally relevant questions has been gradually increasing. It is fundamental research on the processes of instruction and learning. -
The Psychology of School Subjects
A resurgence of interest in schooling by educational psychologists was described. This time, the psychology of school subjects is not merely the commonsense psychology of Thorndike, but a cognitive psychological approach that is equally concerned about the hinking of the learner, the structure of the discipline to be learned, and the form of explanations available to the teacher. -
Methodology
Our methodology increasingly has expanded to make use of cases as to document the genuine problems faced by real people in education; naturalistic studies so that we may enhance external validity; qualitative research because that not everything that we can describe should be measured.
Ethnomethodology (e.g. Erickson, 1986), is becoming an important source of new ideas for educational psychologists who choose to work in school settings on genuine educational problems. -
Assessment
In another mainstream area of educational psychology, assessment, we see less interest in classical standardized testing of achievement, a field (like many others) that Thorndike heavily influenced. We now see more concern for the assessment of portfolios, performance tests, informal classroom assessment by teachers, program evaluation. -
References
Berliner, D. (1993). The 100-year journey of educational psychology. October 20, 2017. Arizona State University. Website: http://www.wou.edu/~girodm/611/Berliner_100years.pdf -
UNIVES
Student: Olivia Rojas Hernández