Educational Psychology's Legacy and Progeny: A Synopsis

• In Event: A 360 View of Learning: Educational Psychologists Grapple With the Contemporary Higher Education Landscape

Abstract

In recognition of the 125th anniversary of the American Psychological Association and of educational psychology as an academic discipline, I was honored by a request to author a special article for the Journal of Educational Psychology. For this article, I was asked to accomplish two particular goals. First, I was to represent educational psychology’s most important contributions over the past 125 years to human learning and development. Second, I was to project into the future and offer my predictions as to educational psychology’s future contributions. In this opening presentation, I will offer a summary of the resulting article, Past as Prologue: Educational Psychology’s Legacy and Progeny, with the intent of stimulating discussion as to what these past achievements and possible futures portend for those who are tasked with teaching educational psychology.

Among educational psychology legacies that I will consider are the “psychologizing” of education, engagement in interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary inquiry, a focus on learning as a core construct, an investment in measurement and an appreciation of human variability, and a search for evidence-based approaches and practices that work. For example, in The Child and the Curriculum, Dewey (1902) wrote about the need for teachers to “psychologize” school content. By this Dewey meant that educators should seek to give life to what they were teaching, thinking of that content as part of a vital and personal experience for students. That is what educational psychologists have sought to do over the past 125 years—to look into the educational experience and to understand how and why students learn, what motivates them academically, and how their lives outside the classroom shape what happens to them inside the classroom.

In my attempt to predict educational psychology’s future contributions, I stay with these five themes but consider their transformations 25 years from now. I build those predictions on powerful change agents that already operate in today’s world. The first is the relentless and unceasing production of information that occurs every minute of every day. The second has to do with the rapid development of “smart” technological hardware and software, and the third has to do with the miniaturization of such technologies and the mind-machine symbiosis that is already occurring.

With these change agents as backdrop, I discuss the following as signifying educational psychology’s future contributions:
Understanding the interface and tensions between (a) learners and the physical and social environments they inhabit (i.e., mind-in-context) and (b) between learners and the virtual worlds they create in their minds (context-in-mind);
Contemplating what it means to learn with and without technological enhancements;
Rethinking the range of human differences that will likely exist and the implications for educational practice;
Reconsidering how and what we measure educationally and how those data could be used to shape educational experiences; and;
Crafting truly unique interventions for each and every student rather than for groups or “classes” of students as now is commonplace.

Author

• Patricia A. Alexander, University of Maryland - College Park