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Educational PsychologyFoundations of Instructional Design

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What is Educational Psychology?

Educational Psychology is

deceptively simple, it is the

application of psychological principles

to the domain of teaching or training

and learning.

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Viewpoints on EducationalPsychology

• Behaviorism

• Developmental Psychology

• Cognitive Psychology

• Constructivism or social psychology

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Behavioral

Psychology

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Behaviorism

• “Behaviorism is a purely objective experimental branch of natural science. Its theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behavior.” (Watson, 1913)

• Behaviorists had a strong impact on education from 1920s until 1970s.

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Behaviorist Writers

• Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936) - conditioning of dogs to salivate or respond when bells are sounded

• John B. Watson ( 1878-1958) - viewed learning as conditioning

• B.F. Skinner (1904-1990) – stimulus/response learning, reinforcement schedules, and behavior modification theories

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More on B.F. Skinner

• Skinner felt that psychology was essentially about behavior and that behavior was largely determined by its outcomes.

• Critique: To educate, you must do more than modify behavior. To educate, you must help the student learn how to develop strategies for learning.

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DevelopmentalPsychology

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Developmentalists

• Developmental psychologists feel that all children go through certain stages of intellectual development in the same order, even though the chronological ages may vary between bright and dull students.

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Developmental Writers

• Jean Piaget (1896-1980) - developed field of developmental psychology

• Alfred Binet - 1905. Developed the IQ test

• Mary Parton - the role of play in children’s learning

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Stages of Mental Development

• Sensorimotor stage - birth to 2 years Child relies on seeing, touching, sucking, feeling, and using their senses to learn things about themselves and the environment

• Preoperative stage - 2 to 7 years Child focuses on one thing at a time, egocentric - thinks others think the same way that they do, language develops.

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More stages

• Concrete Operational - 7 to 12 years The child begins to reason logically, and organize thoughts coherently. However, they can only think about actual physical objects, they cannot handle abstract reasoning. Some people never leave this stage.

• Formal Operational - 12 years to adult Formal operational stage is characterized by the ability to formulate hypotheses and systematically test them to arrive at an answer to a problem.

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Cognitive

Psychology

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Cognitivists

Cognition refers to mental activity including thinking, remembering, learning and using language. When we apply a cognitive approach to learning and teaching, we focus on the understanding of information and concepts. If we are able to understand the connections between concepts, break down information and rebuild with logical connections, then our retention of material will increase.

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Cognitivist Writers

• Jerome Bruner - (1915 - ) advocated discovery learning, information acquired as we categorize experiences

• David Ausubel - (1918 - ) – school learning is verbal learning, advance organizers, meaning acquired when experiences are transferred to the content of consciousness

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Cognitive Psychology

Cognitive psychology is a theoretical perspective that focuses on the realms of human perception, thought, and memory. It portrays learners as active processors of information and assigns critical roles to the knowledge and perspective students bring to their learning. What learners do to enrich information determines the level of understanding they ultimately achieve. [Hofstetter , 1997]

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Constructivism

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Constructivists

Constructivism is a philosophy of learning founded on the premise that, by reflecting on our experiences, we construct our own understanding of the world we live in. Each of us generates our own "rules" and "mental models," which we use to make sense of our experiences. Learning, therefore, is simply the process of adjusting our mental models to accommodate new experiences.

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Constructivist Writers

• Lev Vygotsky - zone of proximics – students can perform in groups with others that which they can not do themselves.

• Ernst von Glaserfeld - radical constructivist - “Knowledge, no matter how it is defined, is in the heads of persons, and that the thinking subject has no alternative but to construct what he or she knows on the basis of his or her own experience.”

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more

• Eleanor Duckworth - if you want people to learn about the material world, you don’t give them words about the material world, you give them the material world."

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Constructivist LearningEnvironment

A constructivist learning environment is characterized by:

• Tasks - open-ended questions• Groups - working collaboratively• Sharing - with others that which was learned

[Grayson Wheatley, 1994]