The psychology of education

Abstract

A tremendous amount is known about educational psychology which is useful to people involved in teaching and learning. Condensing and selecting from this vast body of knowledge has therefore meant that we have had to cover some areas rapidly in order to reach key ideas and conclusions. This means, we hope, that you will not have to wade through a lot of information to reach something interesting. If you want to go into more detail, there are plenty of recent references and further reading to follow up. If you are working or training as a teacher, you should find that this book gives focused and up-Â�todate coverage of the research findings about many of the areas in which you are involved. If you are simply interested in education, the book describes various findings with implications for what we can expect from schooling and the ways in which it might be organised. Perhaps the biggest problem with the educational field is that it is a political hot topic and strong opinions about the nature of effective teaching are often held without reference to empirical evidence. There has also been a general trend over the years to see education as being partly responsible for many of society’s difficulties with respect to younger people. The question of whether such views are valid is one that can be answered in relation to good-Â�quality educational research. As far as possible, the information we describe comes from direct applications of psychological knowledge, or from the use of psychological techniques in educational research. However, there are inevitably biases, which come from the evidence selected, and these are the result of attempts to reflect the balance of likely explanations in each area. Despite this, there are certain areas where we feel strongly that the general weight of findings points in a certain direction. If you disagree, then we hope that this book will spur you on to look for opposing evidence and develop your ideas about the area further. We have also tried to write this book with a theoretical grounding, in order to make knowledge more flexible. This can, however, sometimes obscure any practical implications, so we have put in some additional sections with key implications and a practical scenario as a prompt for some questions. If you have anything at all to do with education, you should therefore find this book factual, useful and, we hope, interesting.