What Is Educational Psychology?

The study of how individuals learn, covering teaching techniques, instructional processes, and personality factors in learning, is referred to as educational psychology. The idea is to figure out how people pick up new information and maintain it.

Not only schools but also workplaces, organized sports, government entities, are examples of places where humans are engaged in some form of education and learning.

Educational psychology is significant because it focuses on gaining a better understanding of and strengthening the critical human capacity to learn.

To explain how people learn, various ideas have been created. The following are some of the most persistent and representative modern-day theories.

3 Top popular Educational Psychology Theories

The Behavior Theory

All behaviors, according to the behavior theory, are taught through conditioning. This school of thought relies heavily on the ideas of behavior modification to explain how people learn.

Teachers might, for instance, reward pupils' learning by giving them tokens that can be swapped for desirable objects like candy or toys. Students will learn if they are rewarded for "good" behavior and penalized for "poor" behavior, according to the behavioral perspective.

While behavioral approaches in educational psychology might be beneficial in some situations, they have been criticized for neglecting to account for individuals ’ attitudes, feelings, and intrinsic drive to learn.

The Cognitive Theory

The cognitive theory holds that from childhood on, humans learn in successive stages (Piaget, 1955).

The cognitive approach has grown in popularity in recent decades, owing to its ability to account for how experiences, beliefs, feelings,  influence the learning process. This hypothesis backs up the assumption that people learn because of their motivation rather than extrinsic rewards. Studying how people analyze, learn, remember, and process information is the goal of cognitive psychology.

The Constructive Theory

Humans learn in phases from childhood onwards, according to the constructive theory.

During these stages, we compare our core concepts of reality, or "schemas," with real-world experiences and alter our schemas as needed.

Reference:

Gaines, J., 2022. What Is Educational Psychology? 6 Examples and Theories. [online] PositivePsychology.com. Available at: <https://positivepsychology.com/educational-psychology/> [AWhat Is Educational Psychology? What You Need to Know

accessed 21 March 2022].