Educational Psychology

It is the special contribution of educational psychology to fill in the gaps in the student's understanding of educational processes and to correct his misconceptions. If the educational psychologist is successful in this undertaking, the student will be helped to see education and its processes in quite a different light - that is, he will see possibilities, relationships, and problems he never saw before. And, by reason of having acquired these new insights, he is likely to become a more effective teacher than he would be if he had not undertaken the study of educational psychology. For instance, the person who has a good psychological understanding of educational processes is not only able to identify more problems in a given classroom situation than can be seen by persons with only a nonscientific understanding of education, but he is also in a position to find more solutions to these problems. The person who has a nonscientific and consequently incomplete understanding of educational processes is more likely to encounter difficulties because he is not aware of what are the really crucial and significant problems.

By the word "learner," we mean the pupils or students who individually and collectively comprise the classroom group - the persons on whose behalf the educational program exists and operates. A great deal of what happens in the classroom (or is expected to happen, but does not) can be explained in terms of the personalities, developmental stages, and psychosocial problems of students who comprise the class. Educational psychology can for example, help a fifth-grade teacher become more effective by providing him with the basis for developing a better understanding of children in general, of children around the ages of eleven and twelve, and of the particular children in his class. Educational psychologists can also help this teacher by telling him something about the patterns of behavior that commonly occur whenever individuals interact with one another.

Thus the hunches of successful teachers are more likely to prove correct than the hunches of unsuccessful ones. However, we do not always have to base our predictions on hunches, and this is one of the reasons why courses such as educational psychology are a part of the professional curriculum for teachers. Psychologists and educators have been studying various aspects of education for many years in search of factors that are related to success and failure in learning. These factors include methods and techniques, personality, maturity, heredity, physical surroundings, motivation, and emotional climate, to name a few of the many factors that have been explored.

One of the difficulties that teachers experience in their attempts to cope with teaching-learning problems is the fact that a main source of their understanding has been the prescientific information and misinformation that forms the layman's concept of education and the educational processes. We commented earlier in this chapter that such concepts might interfere with the development of an effective understanding of educational psychology. One of the reasons why teachers have tended to be prescientific in their teaching has been their orientation toward their work and their profession. Although teaching is one of the oldest of the professions, and its "professional consciousness" is increasing, many teachers still have a tendency not to think of teaching as an expert profession. They have tended instead to fall into the layman's way of thinking that "any educated person can teach."

The expansion of the behavioral sciences and the increasing momentum of the mental hygiene movement during the last generation have produced a wealth of ideas, concepts, and research that have helped to broaden the scope of educational psychology, until it has become coextensive with education itself.