Emphasized the importance of observing teaching and learning in classrooms for improving education.

Recommended to start lessons at a point just beyond the child’s level of knowledge and understanding to stretch the child’s mind

established the first major educational psychology lab in the US

The view of the child as an active learner: children learn best by doing.

Argued that one of schooling’s most important tasks is to hone children’s reasoning skills.

Promoted the idea that educational psychology must have a scientific base and should focus strongly on measurement.

conducted research on African American children’s self-conceptions and identity

the first African American president of the APA

a Latino who conducted research showing that intelligence tests were culturally biased against ethnic minority children

first to use the term gifted to describe children who attained exceptionally high scores on intelligence tests

He argued that the mental processes proposed by psychologists such as James and Dewey were not observable

The Behavioral Approach

concept of “programmed learning” which involved reinforcing the student after each of a series of steps until the student reached a learning goal

Behavioral approach;

created a teaching machine to serve as a tutor and reinforce students for correct answers

The Cognitive Revolution

___: objectives of the behavioral approach to learning did not address many of the actual goals and needs of classroom educators

The Cognitive Revolution

created a taxonomy of cognitive skills that included remembering, comprehending, synthesizing, and evaluating to be used by teachers to help students develop and use

The Cognitive Revolution

ushered an era of enthusiasm for applying the concepts of cognitive psychology to help students learn.

The Cognitive Revolution

• Towards the latter part of the __ century, many education psychologists returned to an emphasis on the cognitive aspects of learning advocated by James and Dewey.

The Cognitive Revolution

• More recently, educational psychologists have increasingly focused on the socioemotional aspects of students’ lives – school as a social context, role of culture in education

Knowledge about organizing ideas, connections among ideas, ways of thinking and arguing, patterns of change within a discipline, beliefs about a discipline, ability to carry ideas from one discipline to another

learner-centered, emphasis on importance of individuals actively constructing their knowledge and understanding.

children should be encouraged to explore their world, discover knowledge, reflect, and think critically.

emphasis on collaboration – children working together with each other in their efforts to know and understand

a structured, teacher-centered approach – teacher direction and control, high teacher expectations for students’ progress.

- maximizing student learning time

Critical thinking skills – thinking reflectively and productively and evaluating evidence ▫ Being open-minded and curious yet at the same time, careful to avoid mistakes in terms of interpretation.

Organizing lessons to maximize students’ learning.

Think about how to make learning both challenging and interesting.

The process of instructional design requires that teachers figure out which things students should do when, in what order, and how.

Good understanding of children’s development and know how to create instructional materials appropriate for their developmental levels.

Keeping the class as a whole working together and oriented toward classroom tasks.

Establishing rules and procedures, organizing groups, monitoring and pacing classroom activities, handling misbehavior.

• Strategies for helping students become self motivated and take responsibility for their learning.

Critical in teaching and in communicating with parents.

Talk “with” rather than “to”

• Keep criticisms at a minimum

• Assertive rather than aggressive, manipulative, or passive communication style.

tailoring assessments to meet students’ needs and abilities.

- involves recognizing individual variations in students’ knowledge, readiness, interests, and other characteristics, and taking these differences into account in planning curriculum and engaging in instruction

Encourage students to have positive personal contact with diverse students and think of ways to create such settings • Broker or middle person

Decide what types of assessments should be used to document students’ performance after instruction.

Technology as a support to learning

Having a good attitude and caring about students Confidence in self-efficacy Refuse negative emotions diminish motivation Bring positive attitude and enthusiasm in the classroom

observing and recording behavior; cannot prove causes of a phenomenon.

▫ Observation: laboratory, naturalistic, participant ▫ Interviews and questionnaires ▫ Standardized tests ▫ Physiological measures ▫ Case studies ▫ Ethnographic studies ▫ Focus groups ▫ Person journals and diaries

describe the strength of relationship between two or more events or characteristics; does not equal causation.

▫ Permissive teaching – children’s lack of self-control ▫ Children’s lack of self-control – permissive teaching ▫ Other factors – PT & lack of SC.

determine causes of behavior – manipulated and constant factors.

▫ Cause: event that is manipulated ▫

Effect: behavior that changes because of the manipulation.

Experimental;

manipulated, influential, experimental.

Experimental;

factor that is measured

Experimental;

experience is manipulated

Eperimental;

comparison group without the manipulated factor

Experimental;

assigning participants to experimental and control groups by chance.

- greatly reduces the probability that the two groups will differ in terms of different factors

Designed to make decisions about the effectiveness of a particular program Often focuses on a specific location or type of program

Results are not intended for generalization

Used to solve a specific classroom or school problem, improve teaching and other educational strategies, to make a decision at a specific location.

- Goal is to improve educational practices immediately in one or two classrooms, at one school, or several schools

teacher-researcher”

Classroom teachers can conduct their own studies to improve their teaching practices using the methods participant observation, interviews, and case studies

uses numerical calculations to discover information

obtaining information using descriptive measures

blends different research designs or methods

Children in different cultures learn to speak very different languages, but they all seem to go through the same sequence of stages.

the different format of speech that adults use when talking with babies that involves the use of shorter sentences with a higher, more melodious pitch than normal speech.

 At about 6 or 7 months, babbling, the rhythmic repetition of various syllables, including both consonants and vowels, begins

 At about 1 year of age, the infant begins to speak a few words, which usually refer to their caregivers and objects in their daily environment

Infants use ___, words that express complete ideas

Vocabulary grows slowly until about 18 months, and then infants learn about 100 words or more per month

The application of a newly learned word to objects that are not included in the meaning of the word (e.g., calling any female person “mama”)

The failure to apply the new word more generally to objects that are included within the meaning of the new word (e.g., not extending the category of “dog” to include dogs that are not the family pet)

Between 18 and 24 months, children experience a vocabulary-acquisition spurt and words are combined into sentences

is the use of 2-word sentences with mainly nouns and verbs (e.g., “Dada eat” for “Dad is having dinner”)

- These 2-word statements begin to be expanded and between the ages of 2 and 5 years, the child implicitly acquires grammar of the native language

Language development is a genetically programmed ability.

However, this ability is not developed without exposure to human speech.

Thus, both nature and nurture are vital to language development

Assumed that a child is an active seeker of knowledge and gains an understanding of the world by operating on it.

Schemas

- Assimilation

- Accommodation

Organized units of knowledge about objects, events, and actions.

Cognitive adaptation.

involves two processes.

Is the interpretation of new.

experiences in terms of present schemes.

is the modification of present schemes to fit with new experiences

For example, a child may call all fourlegged creatures “doggie”

The child learns he needs to accommodate (i.e., change) his schemes, as only one type of four-legged creature is “dog”

It is through accommodation that the number and complexity of a child’s schemes increase and learning occurs

Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development;

Birth to 2 years

Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development;

2 to 6 years

Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development;

6 to 12 years

Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development;

12+ years

children uses senses and motor abilities to learn about the world and develop object permanence

children use symbolic thinking to understand the world but remain egocentric and lack the mental operations that allow logical thinking.

children gain cognitive operations for logical thinking about concrete events, understand conservation, and perform mathematical operations, but they cannot reason abstractly.

Further development of cognitive operations enables adolescents to engage in abstract thinking and hypothetical-deductive reasoning.

Infant learns about the world through their sensory and motor interactions (including reflexes)

Lack object permanence, the knowledge than an object exists independent of perceptual contact

Symbolic representation of objects and events starts to develop during the latter part of the sensorimotor stage (e.g., use of telegraphic speech)

The child’s thinking becomes more symbolic and language-based, but remains egocentric and lacks the mental operations that allow logical thinking

Cannot perceive the world from another person’s perspective

The child, however, can pretend, imagine, and engage in make-believe play

is the inability to distinguish one’s own perceptions, thoughts, and feelings from those of others

Preoperational Stage

- Conservation

- reversibility

- centration

- Egocentrism

the knowledge than an object exists independent of perceptual contact

of objects and events starts to develop during the latter part of the sensorimotor stage (e.g., use of telegraphic speech)

Sensorimotor Stage

- object permanence

- Symbolic representation

is the knowledge that the quantitative properties of an object (such as mass, volume, and number) remain the same despite changes in appearance

Some grasp of conservation marks the end of the preoperational stage and the beginning of the concrete-operational stage

the knowledge that reversing a transformation brings about the conditions that existed before the transformation

A major reason why a preoperational child does not understand conservation is that the child lacks an understanding of REVERSIBILITY, the knowledge that reversing a transformation brings about the conditions that existed before the transformation.

Child’s thinking also reflects CENTRATION, the tendency to focus on only one aspect of a problem at a time

the tendency to focus on only one aspect of a problem at a time

Concrete Operational Stage

- conservation

- transitivity

- seriation

Conservation for liquids, numbers, and matter acquired early, but conservation of length acquired later in the stage

Develops Transitivity (e.g., if A > B, and B > C, then A > C)

the ability to order stimuli along a quantitative dimension (e.g., a set of pencils by their length)

The reasoning of concrete operational children is tied to immediate reality (i.e., what is in front of them and tangible) and not with the hypothetical world of possibility

The child gains the capacity for hypothetical-deductive thought

The Concrete operational child just starts mixing different clear liquids together haphazardly

The Formal operational child develops a systematic plan for deducing what the correct combination must be by determining all of the possible combinations and then systematically testing each one

The formal operational child can evaluate the logic of verbal statements without referring to concrete situations

Evaluation of Piaget’s Theory

Recent research has shown that rudiments of many of Piaget’s key concepts (e.g., object permanence) may begin to appear at earlier stages than Piaget proposed  For example, research that involved tracking infants’ eye movements has found that infants as young as 3 months continue to stare at the place where the object disappeared from sight, indicating some degree of object permanence

Evaluation of Piaget’s Theory 1. Not all people reach formal operational thought 2. The theory may be biased in favor of Western culture 3. There is no real theory of what occurs after the onset of adolescence 4. Despite refinements, recent research has indeed shown that cognitive development seems to proceed in the general sequence of stages that Piaget proposed

Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Approach to Development

Stressed that cognitive abilities develop through interactions with others and represent the shared knowledge of one’s culture

is the difference between what a child can actually do and what the child could do with the help of others (i.e., potential development less actual development)

the parent or teacher adjusts the level of help in relation to the child’s level of performance, while directing the child’s learning progress toward the upper level of her zone of proximal development