Introduction to Educational Psychology: Developing a Professional Knowledge Base

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Introduction to Educational Psychology
Developing a Professional Knowledge Base

• EDU 330 Educational Psychology
• Daniel Moos

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Characteristics of Professionalism
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Professional Knowledge and Learning (I)

• The thinking of children in elementary schools
  tends to be limited to the concrete and tangible,
  whereas the thinking of middle and high school
  students tends to be abstract.
• False? Middle school, high school, and even
  university students can think effectively in the
  abstract only when they are studying areas in
  which they have considerable experience and
  expertise.
• Students generally understand how much they know
  about a topic.
• False Learners in general, and young children
  in particular, often are unable to assess what
  they know.
• Experts in the area of intelligence view
  knowledge of facts, such as "On what continent is
  Brazil?" as one indicator of intelligence.
• True The Wechsler Intelligence Scale for
  Children, the most popular intelligence test in
  use today, has several items very similar to the
  example.

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Professional Knowledge and Learning (II)

• Effective teaching is essentially a process of
  presenting information to students in succinct
  and organized ways.
• False Simply explaining information to
  students often isn't effective in promoting
  understanding. Learners construct their own
  understanding based on what they already know,
  combined with their emotions, beliefs, and
  expectations.
• Preservice teachers who major in a content area,
  such as math, are much more successful than
  nonmajors in providing clear examples of the
  ideas they teach.
• False While knowledge of content is essential,
  understanding how to make that content
  meaningful to students requires an additional
  kind of knowledge.
• Students doing individual work at their seats may
  react negatively when a teacher comes by and
  offers them help.
• True Being perceived as intelligent and
  capable is very important to students,
  particularly as they get older, and researchers
  have found that children as young as 6 rated
  students who were offered unsolicited help lower
  in ability than others offered no help.

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Professional Knowledge and Learning (III)

• To increase students' motivation to learn,
  teachers should praise as much as possible.
• False Overuse of praise detracts from its
  credibility and particularly for older students,
  who may interpret praise given for easy tasks as
  indicating that the teacher thinks they have low
  ability.
•  
• Teachers who are the most successful at creating
  and maintaining orderly classrooms are those who
  can quickly stop disruptions when they occur.
• False Classroom management, one of the
  greatest concerns of preservice and beginning
  teachers, is most effective when teachers prevent
  management problems from occurring in the first
  place.
•  
• Preservice teachers generally believe they will
  be more effective than teachers who are now out
  in the field.
• True Preservice teachers (like yourself) are
  optimistic and idealistic. They believe they'll
  be very effective with young people, and they
  generally believe they'll be better than
  teachers now in the field.

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Professional Knowledge and Learning (IV)

• Teachers primarily learn by teaching in general,
  experience is all that is necessary in learning
  to teach.
• False While experience is essential in
  learning to teach, it
• isn't sufficient by itself. In many cases,
  experience results in repeating the same actions
  and procedures year after year, regardless of
  their effectiveness.
•  
• Testing detracts from learning, because students
  who are tested frequently develop negative
  attitudes and usually learn less than those who
  are tested less often.
• False Frequent, thorough assessment is one of
  the most
• powerful and positive influences on learning.

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What types of knowledge do teachers need? (I)
General pedagogical knowledge (ie How should I
teach?)
Geography teacher uses questions to guide
students understanding has orderly classroom
Understanding principles of instruction and
management
Understanding how learning occurs and
understanding the factors that influence learning
Students learn with concrete examples, especially
with abstract concepts
Knowledge of learners and learning (ie How do my
students learn?)
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What types of knowledge do teachers need? (II)
Knowledge of content (ie What domain-specific
knowledge do I need to have?)
Geography teacher understands concepts longitude
and latitude
Understanding content you are teaching
Pedagogical content knowledge (ie How can I most
effectively teach this domain?)
Understanding how to represent content so it is
understandable to your learners
Draws lines on a beach ball to represent these
concepts. Then, relates ball to globe
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Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support
Consortium (INTASC)

• Knowledge of subject
• Learning and human development
• Adapting instruction
• Strategies
• Motivation and management
• Communication skills
• Planning
• Assessment
• Commitment
• Partnership

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Introduction to Educational Psychology Research
Introduction

• EDU 330 Educational Psychology
• Daniel Moos

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Research (I)
Descriptive
Interviews, observations, surveys to describe
events, etc
Relationship ( or -) between two or more
variables
Correlational
Manipulates variables to examine cause effect
Experimental
Applied research to answer school/classroom
question
Action
Provide concrete examples of learning/teaching in
classroom
Case Studies
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Research (II)

• Research has found negative relationships between
  achievement and the time teachers spend in
  non-instructional activities, such as taking
  roll, passing out papers, and explaining
  procedures (Good Brophy, 1986 Shuell, 1996).
• CORRELATIONAL RESEARCH

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Research (III)

• Teachers were randomly assigned to two groups.
  The first groups was trained to provide students
  with prompts and cues when students initially
  failed to answer a question the second group
  taught as they normally did. Students taught by
  the trained teachers scored significantly higher
  on an achievement test than did students taught
  by the second group of teachers in the control
  group (Anderson, Evertson, Brophy, 1979).
• EXPERIMENTAL RESEARCH

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Research (IV)

• A teacher conducts an experiment to determine if
  frequent homework increases achievement compared
  to infrequent homework.
• ACTION RESEARCH

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Research (V)

• Researchers administered a personality test to
  4,483 university students who considered majoring
  in education, and they later checked the
  students records to see who graduated and what
  majors they selected (Sears, Kennedy, Kaye,
  1997). The researchers found that elementary
  education majors tended to fit a profile
  described as warm, sociable, responsible, and
  caring about people (p. 201), whereas secondary
  majors tended to be oriented to the theoretical,
  disposed to investigate possibilities and
  relationships, and drawn to complexity,
  innovation, and change (p. 201).
• DESCRIPTIVE RESEARCH

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Research (VI)

• Principle Statements that summarizes results
  consistently supported by large number of
  research studies
• Example Thinking of young children tends to be
  dominated by perception
• Theory Set of related principles derived from
  observations and are used to make predictions
  explain phenomena
• Example
• Principle 1 Reinforced behaviors increase
  frequency of that behavior
• Principle 2 Intermittently reinforced behaviors
  persist longer than those that are continuously
  reinforced
• Theory Behaviorism, which attempts to explain
  the effect of experiences on behavior

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Ending Discussion

• Of the different roles that teachers perform,
  which is most important to grade level or content
  level? Least? How does the context of your
  teaching situation influence your answer?
• Manager
• Motivator
• Instructor
• Evaluator
• What are some personal characteristics that make
  teachers effective? Can these be taught or
  developed?

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Ending Discussion, continued

• What is the role of research in teacher decision
  making? How does knowledge of the classroom help
  in this process?
• How can research make teachers more reflective?
  Besides a thorough knowledge of the research
  base, what else can teachers do to make
  themselves more reflective?

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