Educational Assessment: reply to Andrew Davis

Assessment is at the heart of teaching as it provides a necessary condition for judging success or failure. It is also necessary to ensure that providers of education are accountable to users and providers of resources. Inferential hazard is an inescapable part of any assessment procedure but cannot be an argument against assessment as such. Rich knowledge may be the aim of education but it does not follow that it is the aim of every stage of education. Teaching to tests is the most natural way of ensuring that teaching matches assessment. Failure to assess places public education in jeopardy.     

Didactics and its Relation to Educational Psychology: Problems in Translating a Key Concept Across Research Communities

Didactics, meaning the systematic study of the instructional process, has a long tradition in many European countries. In Anglo-American literature, however, didactics is largely absent. Instead, it is often dealt with under the heading of educational psychology, curriculum theory or some other heading. In this article the author clarifies the distinction between educational psychology and didactics, and argues that didactics is a valuable concept whose absence in the Anglo-American tradition of educational studies is a disadvantage.     

Philosophy and Educational Research: a reply to David Bridges et al.

It is argued that, contrary to much contemporary opinion, ‘conceptual analysis’ is not to be seen as a particular ‘school’ of philosophical thought beyond which we have now passed. It is, rather, a practice: an inter‐personal engagement which seeks to clarify meaning without making any ‘assumptions’ and without the benefit of ‘theory’. The necessity of this practice for educational research, indeed for any sharing of minds between people, is obvious: the difficulty lies rather in our own impatience and reluctance to engage in it.     

Envisioning a Culturally Imaginative Educational Psychology

Culture has mostly been neglected in mainstream educational psychology research. In this paper, we argued for the need to cultivate a cultural imagination and provided seven key recommendations for conducting culturally imaginative research. We explained how these recommendations could prove useful in avoiding the two types of errors that trap cross-cultural researchers. The first type is the cultural attribution error which pertains to attributing any observed difference to culture even if culture is not the relevant factor. The second type is the cultural blind spot error which pertains to the failure to see how culture influences psycho-educational processes and outcomes. We proffered seven recommendations to avoid these twin pitfalls. We reviewed the papers published from 2006 to 2016 in four flagship educational psychology journals including the Journal of Educational Psychology, Contemporary Educational Psychology, Cognition and Instruction, and British Journal of Educational Psychology. Our review focused on how educational psychologists have studied culture over the past decade and how the published studies aligned with our seven recommendations. The content analysis indicated that only a small percentage of the articles dealt with culture, most of the studies drew on Western samples, and that almost all studies relied on an etic approach with very few studies using an emic bottom-up perspective. We ended with a justification for why a culturally imaginative educational psychology is urgently needed in an increasingly diverse world.     

教育心理学:后现代主义的挑战

进入20世纪90年代以后,教育心理学面临来自后现代主义思潮的挑战。在本体论方面,后现代思潮挑战传统教育心理学的实在论倾向,主张心理是一种社会建构;在认识论方面,后现代思潮挑战传统的知识外源论和内源论观点,主张知识是社会互动和协商的结果,教育教学同样是知识建构的过程;在方法论方面,后现代思潮挑战传统的实证和量化方法,主张质化研究和量化研究的结合,力促教育心理学实现方法多元化。后现代主义的挑战有助于克服传统教育心理学的机械反映论、个体主义和方法中心等错误倾向。     

Educational Psychology: The distinctive contribution

This paper, written in the twenty‐first anniversary year of the journal Educational Psychology in Practice, attempts to uncover those distinctive aspects of the discipline and the practice of applied psychology in general and educational psychology in particular. After considering some of the reasons for attempting this task at this point in time and outlining some of the difficulties involved in achieving this task, five distinctive dimensions are identified and discussed. These are: (i) adopting a psychological perspective to human problems; (ii) uncovering mediating/psychological variables which link particular situations with specific outcomes; (iii) employing psychological knowledge to create explanatory models of complex human problems; (iv) using evidence based strategies for change; and (v) sharing and promoting big ideas from psychology. Some of the possibilities which these distinctive features offer for innovation in educational psychology practice and research are listed, together with their implications for educational psychology practitioners in the future.     

Educational Psychology and Curriculum Design: a child‐centred approach

The links between curriculum design and educational psychology are, in principle, strong but are, in practice, becoming increasingly tenuous particularly with the apparent preference of the Department of Education and Science for a curriculum based upon certain ‘core’ subjects. A framework for a curriculum based upon the five communication skills of literacy, oracy, numeracy, graphicacy and physiognomacy is proposed. These are ‘basics’ yet represent the essentials of aesthetic education; their use ‘across the curriculum’ could lead to the establishment of ‘whole school’ curriculum policies. Some consideration is made of the relationship of educational psychology, and of Gardner's ‘multiple intelligences’, to the five forms of communication, with particular emphasis on graphicacy (spatial ability) and on physiognomacy (physical ability) which are skills commonly neglected in curriculum planning.     

教育心理学:历史、分歧与超越

桑代克在尝试教育心理学科学化的同时,背离了詹姆斯、杜威等教育心理学的祖父辈人物与教育亲和的思想传统,从对学校教育问题有真实兴趣转向了蔑视学校教育实践,造成了心理学家对教育的一种傲慢态度。同时,也在教育心理学内部形成了两种对抗的观点:一是视教育心理学为普通心理学研究的一个应用领域,是实验心理学在教育领域的延伸;二是视教育心理学为教育情境中人类行为的科学研究,是一门独立的应用性学科。教育心理学领域中这两种观点的分歧,究其本质,是两种科学观的对立,反映了心理学中科学主义和人文主义两种文化的对立。新近在心理学、教育学中兴起的循证实践,在方法论层面为超越两种教育心理学的分歧提供了可供选择的途径。     

A Self-Regulated Learning Approach to Teaching Educational Psychology

In this paper, we describe an undergraduate educational psychology course that utilizes self-regulated learning as the organizing principle. The course aims to facilitate students' development in self-regulated learning and to promote students' understanding of how to embed instruction for self-regulated learning strategies into classroom teaching. In the first section of the paper, we develop the rationale for this position and identify underlying assumptions we believe should guide the development and implementation of such a program. In the second section of the paper, we demonstrate how we have incorporated these assumptions in a basic educational psychology course.     

The Future of Educational Psychology and the Content of the Graduate Program in Educational Psychology

Leaders in educational psychology are pointing out increasing opportunities for careers in educational psychology or in education-related work in universities and other settings. A program of graduate education in educational psychology is essential for preparing the current generation of graduate students for these careers. This article presents a procedure for determining the content of local graduate programs and suggests the desirability of identifying a common core of content to be included in all graduate programs. The future of educational psychology is assumed to depend on how well educational psychologists are prepared.     

人本主义教育心理学与教学改革

人本主义教育心理学从自我实现的人格理论出发，认为理想的教育是以“学生”为中心的教育，教育的目标是培养知，情统一的“完人”，为实现这一目标，教师的关键就在于为学生创造各种学习契机、营造良好的心理气氛，构造充满自由的有意义的学习空间，这一思想对于我国教学改革的深入发展具有启发意义。     

布鲁纳教育心理学思想及其启示

布鲁纳是美国当代最负盛名的认知心理学家之一,他在教育学、心理学、化学诸多领域都有广泛而深入的研究。深入考察布鲁纳教育心理学思想的来龙去脉,对于当前的教育改革以及教育理论的建设不无启示。     

积极心理学及其教育启示

积极心理学(positive psychology)是近年来西方心理学界新兴的研究领域,它对二战后心理学中存在以消极心理学为主导的倾向提出了质疑,主张心理学应对人类自身拥有的积极品质加以研究.由于近年来国内学校心理健康教育逐渐从"问题"取向转变为发展性取向,积极心理学的成果为发展性心理辅导提供了有力的理论支持.以下就积极心理学的基本思想、研究领域作简要介绍,以及对学校心理辅导的启示谈几点意见,供大家参考.