Educational Psychology Foundations of IT

Educational Psychology
Foundations of IT
San Jose State University
Copyright 2004
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 Educational
Psychology
? Behaviorism
? Developmental Psychology
? Cognitive Psychology
? Constructivism or social psychology
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.
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 modi?cation
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.
Developmental
Psychology
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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.
Developmental Writers
? Jean Piaget (1896-1980) - developed ?eld
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.
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
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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Neurobiological Model of
Learning
Incidential Learning
Rehearsal
Stimuli
Short-term or
Elaboration
Long-term
(tongue, eyes,
Working memory
memory
ears, skin,
(Holds 7 + 2 bits
(Information stored
Nose)
of information
Rehearsal
In packets or
for 18 seconds)
(24 hours needed
Schema)
to verify that
Information is in LTM)
Lost information Forgetting Forgetting
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]
Constructivism
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Constructivists
? Constructivism is a philosophy of learning
founded on the premise that, by re?ecting
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.
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 de?ned, 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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