Educational Psychology

Child and Adolescent Learners, and Learning Principles

• Learning objectives include:
  • Explaining the 14 learner-centered principles
  • Advocacy for the use of the 14 principles in the teaching-learning process
  • Identifying ways to apply the 14 principles in instruction as a future teacher

Learner Centered Psychological Principles

• The American Psychological Association developed 14 psychological principles.
• The 14 principles pertain to the learner and the learning process, focusing on:
  • Psychological factors that are primarily internal
  • Factors under the learner's control, rather than conditioned habits or physiological factors
  • Also acknowledges the external environment or contextual factors that interact with internal ones
• They deal holistically with learners in real-world learning situations.
• They should be understood as an organized set, not in isolation.
• They are divided into:
  • Cognitive and metacognitive factors
  • Motivational and affective factors
  • Developmental and social factors
  • Individual difference factors
• The principles apply to all learners, including children, teachers, administrators, parents, and community members in the educational system.

Cognitive and Metacognitive Factors

• Nature of the Learning Process: Learning complex subject matter is most effective when intentionally constructing meaning from information and experience.
  • Successful learners are:
    • Active
    • Goal-directed
    • Self-regulating
    • Assume personal responsibility
• Goals of the Learning Process: Over time, with support and guidance, successful learners create meaningful, coherent knowledge representations.
  • Educators assist learners create meaningful learning goals, consistent with personal/educational aspirations/interests.
• Construction of Knowledge: Successful learners link new information in meaningful ways with existing knowledge.
• Strategic Thinking: Successful learners create and use thinking/Reasoning Strategies to achieve complex learning goals.
• Thinking About Thinking: Higher order strategies for selecting and monitoring mental operations, facilitate creative and critical thinking.
• Context of Learning: Learning is influenced by culture, technology, and instructional practices.

Motivational and Affective Factors

• Motivational and Emotional Influences on Learning:
  • What and how much is learned depends on the learner's motivation.
  • Motivation is influenced by emotional states, beliefs, interests, goals, and habits of thinking.
• Intrinsic Motivation to Learn:
  • Creativity, higher-order thinking, and natural curiosity contribute to motivation.
  • Intrinsic motivation is stimulated by tasks of optimal novelty and difficulty that are relevant to personal interests, offer personal choice and control.
• Effects of Motivation on Effort: Acquisition of complex knowledge/skills requires extended effort and guided practice.
  • The willingness to exert effort requires motivation, which is unlikely without coercion.

Developmental and Social Factors

• Developmental Influences on Learning: As individuals develop, learning shows constraints and opportunities.
  • Learning is most effective when differential physical, intellectual, emotional, and social development is considered.
• Social Influences on Learning: Learning is influenced by social interactions, relationships, and communication with others.
  • Social interactions are important for learning.

Individual Differences Factors

• Learners have different strategies, approaches, and capabilities for learning based on prior experience and heredity.
• Learning is most effective when linguistic, cultural, and social differences are considered.
• High and appropriately challenging standards and learner assessment are integral to learning progress.

Alexander and Murphy: Summary of 14 Principles

• An existing knowledge base serves as the foundation for all future learning, influencing how a learner represents new information and experiences.
• Learners can develop skills to effectively reflect and regulate their thoughts and behaviors.
• Factors like intrinsic motivation, reasons for learning, personal goals, and enjoyment play a crucial role in the learning process.
• Learning is a unique journey influenced by genetic and environmental combinations.
• Learning occurs in both societal and individual contexts.

Characteristics of Human Development

• Lifelong: Continues throughout adulthood.
• Plastic: Potential for change exists throughout the life-span, aging associates with intellectual decline.
• Multidimensional: Consists of biological, cognitive, and socio-emotional elements.
• Relatively orderly: Follows proximodistal and cephalo-caudal patterns.
• Gradual: Takes weeks, months, or years for developmental changes to be displayed
• Cognitive processes involve changes in an individual's thought, intelligence, and language.
• Socioemotional Processes: changes to relationships with other people, emotions and personality
• Contextual: Individuals adapt to their biological make up, physical environment, history, society, and culture.

Stages of Development and Developmental Tasks

• Each developmental stage includes an expected developmental task.
• Prenatal Period (Conception to Birth): Tremendous growth from a single cell to a complete organism.
• Infancy (Birth to 18-24 Months): Extreme dependence on adults; beginnings of language, symbolic thought, sensorimotor coordination, and social learning.
• Early Childhood (End of Infancy to 5-6 Years): Preschool years, becoming self-sufficient, developing school readiness skills, and social play.
• Middle and Late Childhood (6-11 Years): Elementary school years, mastering fundamental skills (reading, writing, arithmetic), exposure to a larger world, central theme of achievement
• Adolescence (10-12 to 18-22 Years): Rapid physical changes, pursuit of independence and identity, more logical/abstract thinking, increasing time spent outside the family.
• Early Adulthood (Late Teens/Early 20s to 30s): Establishing personal and economic independence, career development, selecting a mate, starting a family.
• Middle Adulthood (40 to 60 Years): Expanding personal/social involvement, assisting the next generation, maintaining career satisfaction.
• Late Adulthood (60s and Above): Adjustment to decreasing strength and health, life review, retirement, adjustment to new social roles.
• These stages were compiled by Santrock, they are the same as Havighurst but Havighurst did not include pre-natal and combined infancy and early childhood.

Research in Child and Adolescent Development and the Principles

• Research provides teachers and policymakers with knowledge for decision-making for learners and families.

Teachers as Researchers

• Research is not only for students writing their thesis, but for practicing learners in their role as researchers.

The Scientific Method

• Identify and define the problem
• Determine the hypothesis
• Collect and analyze data
• Formulate conclusions
• Apply conclusions to the original hypothesis
• (From Dewey)

Research Designs

• Case Study:
  • An in-depth look at one person that provides information about fears, hopes, traumatic experience and anything else that relates to ones development (Santrock, 2002)
  • Needs to be taken with a grain of salt when generalizing the information because every subject is unique, also involves judgement of the observing psychologist as well.
• Correlation Study:
  • A study that determines the relationship between two things, the stronger two events are the stronger they can be linked (Kantowitz, et al, 2001 cited by Santrock, 2002)
  • Not the most reliable as manipulation of elements is not possible to prove cause
• Experimental:
  • Reliable for establishing cause and effect since they can manipulate 1 variable and find causes.
  • Random selection is important.
• Naturalistic Observation:
  • Technique involving observation of subjects in their natural environment.
  • Cannot easily determine cause and factor outside variables
• Longitudinal:
  • Design where the same individual is studied overt time
  • Ability to monitor trends and record
  • Can be expensive and subjects can lose interest
• Cross-Sectional:
  • Individuals are studies at different stages of life, but all one time
  • Researcher does not need to wait for people to age
  • gives information about individuals characteristics
• Sequential:
  • Combined models from cross sectional and longitudinal (Schaie, 1993 cited by Satrock, 2002).

Data Gathering Techniques

• Observation: Observe individuals in laboratory setting or natural ones
• Physiological Measures: Measuring the subjects physiological state : heart rate, bone growth, body weight
• Standardized: Administer tests to assess individuals performance in different domains
• Interviews and Questionnaires: Surveys or interview
• Life-History Records: Records of individuals personal information

Ethical Principles

• Teacher researchers are subject to ethical principles
• Research procedures cannot harm participant physically or psychological
• Rights to researcher information and possible risks
• Answers provided should respect privacy

Data Privacy Act of 2012 R.A. 10173

• Law states that the collection of personal data must be a declared, specified, and have a legitimate purpose.
• Consent is required to collect information

Impact of Teachers' Research Involvement on Teachers

• Research leads involved teachers to become more critical, reflective and more open to professional growth (Oja & Pine 1989; Henson 1996; Keyes 2000; Rust 2007).
• Participating teachers are more deliberate
• Teacher research is valuable to lifelong learning (Mills 2000; Stringer 2007).
• Revisiting how one thinks of teaching
• Connected to learning to inquire. (Borko, Liston, & Whitcomb 2007)

Sigmund Freud, and psychoanalytic Theory

• Freud was born in 1856, and is an Austrian Neurologist that founded psychoanalysis.
• He studied how the mind works in other people

Psychosexual Development

• Erogenous zones are pleasure area
• Fixation happened when zones are not touched

The Stages of Psychosexual Development

• Oral Stage (Birth-1 Year):
  • Erogenous Zone: Mouth
  • Satisfaction at this stage can lead to Oral Fixation, or a focus on biting and sucking.
• Anal Stage (1-3 Years):
  • Erogenous Zone: Bowel and Bladder Control/Anus
  • Success based on how parents approach toilet training
• Phallic Stage (3-6 Years):
  • Erogenous Zone: Genitals
  • During this, boys view their fathers as rivals.
  • Oedipus Complex - feelings of wanting the mother
  • Electra Complex - feelings from girls towards there mothers
• Latency Stage (6-Puberty): Sexual feelings are inactive.
• Genital Stage (Puberty-Death): Maturing sexual interests.

Id, Ego, and Superego: Freud's Elements of Personality

• Freud states that personality components creates human behaviors.
  • Id: Exists from birth, unconscious/primitive behaviors.
    • Is responsible for pleasure principles
  • Ego: Develops from the Id.
    • Conscious and responsible to dealing with reality that is conscious.
  • SuperEgo: Provides guidelines for judgements.

SuperEgo

• Conscience: Information to the view bad actions from parents and punishments.
• Ego Ideal: Rules and standards for behaviors

Jean Piaget. and Cognitive Development

• Swiss psychologist and genetic epistemologist.
• Theory of cognitive development.
• Studied how children develop intellectually throughout the course of childhood.

Basic Cognitive Concepts

• Schema– individuals intellectually adapt to and organize their environment. It is an individual's way to understand or create meaning about a thing or experience.
• Assimilation fitting a new experience into an existing or previously created cognitive structure or schema.
• Accommodation creating a new schema.
• Equilibration-people have the natural need to understand how the world works and to find order, structure, and predictability in their life,

Piaget's Stages of Cognitive Development

• Stage 1: Sensori-motor Stage : The first stage corresponds from birth to infancy.

• Stage 2:

  • Pre-operational Stage Covers
  • from about two to seven years old, roughly
  • corresponding to pre-school years.
    • Intelligence at this stage is intuitive in nature.
      • Symbolic Function- The ability to use symbols
      • Is A thing that represent something else
      • Gradually develops
      • the period of 2 to 7 years.

• Egocentrism.

  • Is the tendency of the child to only see his
  • point of view and to assume that everyone also has
  • his same point of view.

• Centration.

  • the tendency of the child to only focus on
  • one aspect of a thing or event and exclude other
  • aspects.

• Animism.

• is the tendency of children to attribute human like traits or characteristics to inanimate objects.

• Transductive reasoning.

• refers to the pre-operational child’s type of reasoning that is neither inductive nor deductive.

• Stage 3. Concrete-Operational Stage.

  • Ability of the child to think-
  • logically but only in terms of concrete objects.
  • Between 8-11 years
    • Decentering-ability of child to perceive different features of objects can do all features
    • No longer is child focused or limited to 1 aspect of dimension
    • Now more logical when dealing with concrete objects

• Reversibility: concrete operations/operations in reverse

• Conservation: certain qualities mass volume area do not change

• Series: Able to arrange items correctly via order and arrangement

• Stage 4:\ Formal Operational stage.

• In the final stage or formal operations covering ages between 12 and 15 years - Hypothesize reasoning- gather weighs data to form final decisions - Can be done without objects/ what if questions

• Anological reasoning.

  • Ability to follow relationships-to limit similar situations.

• Deductive Reasoning.

• Logical thinking and applying general rules

Kohlberg's Theory of Moral Development

• Preconventional Morality.
  • 0 to 9 - Stage 1: Obedience and punishment Stage 2: - Individualism and exchange
• Conventional Morality.
  • Early adolescence to adulthood Stage 3:
    • Developing good interpersonal relationships
    • Stage 4: Maintaining social order
• Postconventional Morality.
• Some adults; rare Social contract and individual rights stage 6:
• Universal principles

Vygotsky's Socio-Cultural Theory

• Vygotsky focused on cognition and individual social interactions.
• He emphasized the role of the environment and more on social interactions
• He noted that effective learning happens with the social context
• Parents lead to children explanation and assist them to work together.

Zone of Proximal Development

• Occurs when learning as child attempts to perform skill
  • Help with a more MKO such as a adult peer and child can progress
  • Assistance to allow child to independently
• The zone represents a learning to assistance to help children develop by teacher adult are a pair to make learning more effective
• Process must move in 4 labels - First I will do and watch - I do you help - U do I help - Ud I wash.