Educational psychology is the study of how humans learn in educational settings, the effectiveness of educational interventions, the psychology of teaching, and the social psychology of schools as organizations. Educational psychology is concerned with how students learn and develop, often focusing on subgroups such as gifted children and those subject to specific disabilities. Researchers and theorists are likely to be identified in the US and Canada as educational psychologists, whereas practitioners in schools or school-related settings are identified as school psychologists. This distinction is, however, not made in the UK, where the generic term for practitioners is "educational psychologist."
Educational psychology can in part be understood through its relationship with other disciplines. It is informed primarily by psychology, bearing a relationship to that discipline analogous to the relationship between medicine and biology. Educational psychology in turn informs a wide range of specialities within educational studies, including instructional design, educational technology, curriculum development, organizational learning, special education and classroom management. Educational psychology both draws from and contributes to cognitive science and the learning sciences. In universities, departments of educational psychology are usually housed within faculties of education, possibly accounting for the lack of representation of educational psychology content in introductory psychology textbooks.
Read more about Educational Psychology: Social, Moral and Cognitive Development, Individual Differences and Disabilities, Learning and Cognition, Motivation, Research Methodology, Applications in Instructional Design and Technology, Applications in Teaching, Research Journals
Famous quotes containing the words educational and/or psychology:
“Class is rarely talked about in the United States; nowhere is there a more intense silence about the reality of class differences than in educational settings.”
—bell hooks (b. c. 1955)
“Fundamentally the male artist approximates more to the psychology of woman, who, biologically speaking, is a purely creative being and whose personality has been as mysterious and unfathomable to the man as the artist has been to the average person.”
—Beatrice Hinkle (18741953)