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600 BCE
Plato and Aristotle
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 role of the teacher; the relations between teacher and student; the means and methods of teaching; the nature of learning; the order of learning; affect and learning; and learning apart from a teacher. -
Period: 500 BCE to 600 BCE
The Origins of Educational Psychology
In the fifth century B.C., Democritus, wrote on the advantages
conferred by schooling and the influence of the home on learning -
100 BCE
Roman times
Quintilian (35-100 A.D.)argued in favor of public rather than
private education to preserve democratic ideals--a battle still being fought today.
He condemned physical force as a method of discipline, commenting that good
teaching and an attractive curriculum take care of most behavior problems -
1500
Juan Luis Vives (1492- 1540)
Herbart noted that what is to be learned must be practiced, and in this way he anticipated Thorndike's law of exercise. He wrote on practical knowledge and the need to engage student interest, anticipating Dewey. He discussed the schools' role in moral growth, anticipating the work of Dewey, Piaget, Kohlberg, and Gilligan. He wrote about learning being dependent on self-activity, a precursor to contemporary research on metacognition. -
1501
The contributions of our ancestors
Juan Luis Vives (1492- 1540) wrote very much as a contemporary educational psychologist might in the first part of the 16th century. He stated to teachers and others with educational responsibilities, such as those in government and commerce, that there should be an orderly presentation of the facts to be learned, and in this way he anticipated Herbart and the 19th-century psychologists. -
Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776- 1841)
Herbartians promoted teaching by means of a logical progression of learning, a revolutionary idea at the end of the 19th century.They promoted the five formal steps for teaching virtually any subject matter: (a) preparation (of the mind of the student), (b) presentation (of the material to be learned), (c) comparison, (d) generalization, and (e) application. -
General psychology and educational psychology
Three individuals prepared the way to that victory so decisively won, eventually, by E. L. Thorndike. These major figures were William James, his student G. Stanley Hall, and Hall's student, John Dewey. -
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William James
He sais that the science only lays down lines within which the rules of the art must fall, laws which the follower of the art must not transgress; but what particular thing he shall positively do within those lines is left exclusively to his own genius.To know psychology, therefore, is absolutely no guarantee that we shall be good teachers. -
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G. Stanley Hall (1844-1924)
With his study of the contents of children's minds, begun in 1883 among Boston kindergarten children, Hall is credited with starting American developmental psychology in general and the child study movement in particular. Like Piaget 50 years later, Hall inquired into children's conceptions of nature, including animals, plants, and the solar system. And like Robert Coles 100 years later, he questioned
what children knew about numbers, religion, death, fear, sex, and their own bodies. -
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John Dewey (1859-1952)
He noted that stimuli and responses occur as part of previous
and future chains, because that is the nature of experience. We should think of the stimulus and response as inseparable entities. Experience, as James had noted, is a stream. Dewey argued that what held together stimuli and their responses were the interpretations given to both, thus putting consciousness,
attribution, and constructivist views squarely before the emerging stimulusresponse (S-R) psychologists of that time. -
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E. L. Thorndike (1874-1947)
Thorndike believed that only empirical work should guide education. His faith in experimental psychological science and statistics was unshakable. In his Introduction to Teaching (E. Thorndike, 1906), he wrote that psychological science is to teaching as botany is to farming, mechanics is to architecture, and physiology and pathology are to the physician. -
The Principles of education
The Principles made the role of nurture by emphasizing the plasticity of the nervous system. James called acquired habit "the enormous fly-wheel of society". (W. James, 1892, p. 21). It was habit, he
explained, that keeps the workers of the most repulsive trades in their business. It keeps the fishermen and loggers, the miners and the farmers, all steadily working and not rising up and attacking the rich. It is early acquired habit that guides behavior and holds society together. -
Views of the Founding Figures Before Thorndike
James taught that psychology did not have the whole picture of human beings and that science probably never would.
Dewey held to a holistic
psychology, understood the teacher as a social being, and thought that if psychology presented its findings as truths to be applied it would necessarily put teachers in a position of servitude. He saw laboratory psychology as limited and all psychological findings as tentative, as working hypotheses for teachers to test. -
A 1948 committee of APA's Division 15 (the Division of Educational Psychology)
Noted that educational psychology had disavowed responsibility for the directions in which education would go. Educational psychologists seemed to be interested in the laws of learning, not in issues of schooling and teaching. Worse, this committee noted that educational psychologists could neither understand nor be understood by educators--the ultimate irony for a field that once accepted the homage of educators as practitioners of the "master
science" -
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. The APA Divisions of Evaluation and Measurement, Childhood and Adolescence, Personality and Social, School Psychology, and Maturity and Old Age appeared to have as much claim as we did on the study of such psychological functions as learning, adjustment, individual differences, tests
and measurement, statistics, and growth and development. -
Recent Trends
We are at the end of a century in which we psychologists first showed great interest in education. Eventually, although productive and busy in academic settings, we showed disdain for the real-world problems of schooling. -
Research on Teaching
From the 1960s on, we have developed a specialty area in research on teaching (see Gage, 1963). From initial simple models of behavior using traditional psychological methodology, we have moved to more sophisticated, cognitively oriented, naturalistic, contextually sensitive, participatory studies. -
John B. Carroll (1963)
He is the creator of one of our discipline's most elegant, parsimonious, and influential theories of learning, one derived from a practical problem of instruction, noted that the potential of educational psychology remained untapped because it seemed not to be concerned with genuine educational problems. Carroll said that until educational psychology provided evidence that it dealt with the real problems of schooling. -
The Nether Side of Thorndike's Influence
McDonald (1964) called that period before World War II the nadir of the profession, and this is partially true, although it was also a function of a great depression. Some enduring work of practical significance was completed during the 1930s by those whom we call educational psychologists--Gates, Brownell, Pressey, McConnell, to
name just a few--but much of the work that impacted our field was being done by psychologists who were not primarily interested in education. -
Philip Jackson (1981)
He cited four ways in which the introduction to the maiden issue
of the Journal of Educational Psychology set the stage for the difficulties that would follow. In that introduction, Thorndike first failed to distinguish between the goals of and the methods used in the physical and the social sciences. -
Instructional Psychology
A major area of educational psychology has been instructional psychology. Instructional psychology is no longer basic psychology applied to education. 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, appropriately enough, in the G. Stanley Hall Lecture Series by Lee Shulman (1981), over a decade ago. He and his students have once again brought to the forefront of educational psychology the study of school subjects, demonstrating a concern for
practice and the problems of instruction in the real world. -
Methodology
The methodology increasingly has expanded to make use of (a) cases as to document the genuine problems faced by real people in education; (b) naturalistic studies--so that we may enhance external validity; (c) qualitative research and (d) small samples, intensively studied because we have seen that different but useful things are learned from studies of a few informants, in depth, rather than from studies of many subjects whose thoughts are barely known. -
Assessment
Now are more concern for (a) the assessment of portfolios--to better reflect the achievement of students in their classroorns; (b) performance tests a venerable form of assessment brought back
into the limelight because we have learned that classical forms of testing can not easily be made to tap complex aspects of human cognition; (c) informal classroom assessment by teachers, and (d) program evaluation which now is seen as a political process. -
Redefining Educational Psychology
The psychologizing role certainly requires that we bring our considerable talents, our rich disciplinary perspective, our concepts and methods and habits of mind to bear on the genuine problems of administrators, teachers, students, curriculum and instruction, teacher education, and so forth. But, as stated, it is the problems of the field that are the origins of our interest as psychologists. -
References
Berliner, D. (1993). The 100-year journey of educational psychology. October 20, 2017. Arizona State University Dewey, J. (1910). How we think. Lexington, MA: Heath. James, W. (1890). Principles of psychology (2 Vols.). New York: Holt. McDonald, F. J. ( 1964). The influence of learning theories on education (1900- 1950). In E. R. Hilgard (Ed.), Theories of learning and instruction (Sixty-third Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, Part 1, pp. I - 26).