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500 BCE
Democritus
He wrote on the advantages conferred by schooling and the influence of the home on learning. -
384 BCE
Plato and Aristotle
They described Educational Psychology topics: 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; etc. -
1501
Juan Luis Vives 16th Century
He 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. -
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Comenius
Humanist writing at the beginning of the modern era also influenced both educational and psychoeducational thought.
He taught that understanding, not memory, is the goal of instruction; that we learn best that which we have an opportunity to teach; and that parents have a role to play in the schooling of their children. -
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Johann Friedrich Herbart
He is considered the first voice of the modern era of psychoeducational thought. His disciples, the Herbatians, promoted teaching by means of a logical progression of learning, a revolutionary idea at the end of the 19th century. They made pedagogical technique the focus of scientific study, pointing the way, eventually, to the field of research on teaching. -
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The Grand Father and Grand Uncles of Educational Psychology
William James, his student G. Stanley Hall, and Hall's student, John Dewey.
They distinguished themselves in general psychology as well as in educational psychology, fields that overlapped considerably at the end of the 19th century. -
John Dewey
He published his first major article in psychology, on which he wrote about relations between Stimuli and Responses.
He was for what we would call today the development of thinking skills.
Dewey 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. -
William James
He is considered the central figure in the establishment of psychology in America. He saw education as a crucial element of society, with the school a place for habits to be acquired by design. At this time, he did see the study of psychology as useful in 3 ways:
1. To provide the underpinnings for beliefs about instruction,
2. To prohibit teachers from making certain egregious errors,
3. To provide intellectual support to teachers for some of their pedagogical decisions. -
Edward Lee Thorndike
He is famous in psychology for his work on learning theory that leads to the development of operant conditioning within Behaviorism.
He gave us the first standardized achievement test and developed intelligence tests and compiled dictionaries, as well. Thorndike believed that only empirical work should guide education. -
G. Stanley Hall
Hall inquired into children's conceptions of nature, including animals, plants, and the solar system.
His students numbered well over half of all PhDs in American psychology.
This Popular movement accomplished at least three things:
1. That science could guide educational thought.
2. Promoted the belief that anyone could be a scientist.
3. Promoted the idea that data from the natural environment are at least equal to those of the laboratory. -
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Educational Psychology at Mid - Century
By the time Wrld War II began, Educational Psychology had gone astray But since the end of it, committees were formed to deal with educational psychology's increasingly obvious problems.
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. -
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Recent Trends. Educational psychology has come to respect educational practitioners and the instructional, political, and social problems they encounter.
Research on Teaching: We have developed a specialty area in research on the teaching we have moved to more sophisticated, cognitively oriented, naturalistic, contextually sensitive, participatory studies.
The psychology of school subjects: Is a cognitive psychological approach that is equally concerned about the thinking of the learner, the structure of the discipline to be learned, and the form of explanations available to the teacher. -
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Recent Events
Methodology:
Our methodology increasingly has expanded to make use of
(a) Cases.
(b) Naturalistic studies.
(c) Qualitative research
(d) Small samples, intensively studied. Assessment:
far more Deweyan and much less Thorndikian than was true when educational psychologists began to work in program evaluation:
(a) the assessment of portfolios
(b) performance tests
(c) informal classroom assessment by teachers
(d) program evaluation
