There is much discussion about what young people should do
in their childhood and youth to prepare them for success in adulthood.
Once the desired end results or the prerequisites for success have determined ,
it is necessary to determine the means or the conditions by which those can be
brought about. Education and schooling are two terms that are often
associated with these conditions.
While
education and schooling are sometimes thought to be interchangeable, there are
some important distinctions as is evident in these basic definitions:
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The process of:
(1)
developing the capacities and potential of the individual so as to prepare
that individual to be successful in a specific society or culture. From this
perspective, education is serving primarily an individual development
function.
(2)
the process by which society transmits to new members the values, beliefs,
knowledge, and symbolic expressions to make communication possible within
society. In this sense, education is serving a social and cultural function.
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Teaching and learning that takes
place in formal environments.
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Three
categories of education are generally recognized: non-formal, informal, and
formal (LaBelle, 1982). Non-formal education begins at birth and
continues throughout life. It is provide by parents, siblings, friends,
and so forth; it is constant and ongoing. Informal education involves
somewhat structured guidance of learning, but is done without a lot of formal
structure. Attending Sunday school or Boy or Girl Scout meetings would
involve this category of education.
Formal
education, or schooling, generally begins somewhere between 4 and 6 when
children are gathered together for the purposes of specific guidance related to
skills and competencies that society deems important. In the USA, it
generally continues through grade 12 for at least 75% of adolescents and then
sporadically throughout adulthood. In the past, once the formal primary
or secondary schooling was completed, a person's activity in a formal
teaching/learning process was over (Wagner, 2008). However, in today's digital,
information,
or conceptual
age, adults are quite often learning in formal settings throughout their
working lives and even into retirement.
The
definitions of schooling and education immediately raise some important issues:
What is the nature of a human being and what is the nature of the society or culture in which the child is expected to be successful?
These larger questions are addressed to some extent in educational psychology
courses, but are more readily addressed in developmental psychology and
foundations of education courses. That is why these courses are often
prerequisites to courses in educational psychology.
Educational
Psychology is a combination or overlapping of
two separate fields of study. The first is psychology,
which can be defined as the scientific study of the mind and
behavior
(or behavior and mental processes), especially as it relates to individual human beings. Note that it is the scientific
study of mind or mental processes (covert or internal) as well as
behavior (overt or external). People who study psychological
phenomena are not necessarily limited to the study of human beings (a large
body of research relating to animals has been developed) nor are they limited
to only studying individuals. However, when studying groups of
individuals, the focus is generally on how individuals perform within the group
rather than the study of the group as a whole. Scientists who study
animals and people in terms of group- and institutional-behavior generally
align themselves with sociology
while individuals who focus on human culture and belief systems generally align
themselves with anthropology.
The
second field of study with which educational psychology aligns itself is education or more specifically schooling, as
defined above. That is, the primary focus of this subdiscipline of
psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior (or mental processes
and behavior) in the context of formally socializing and developing the
potential of individual human beings.
Educational psychology is therefore a distinct scientific discipline within
psychology that includes both methods of study and a resulting knowledge
base. It is concerned primarily with understanding the processes of
teaching and learning that take place within formal environments and developing
ways of improving the affiliated operations and procedures. Educational
psychologists are interested in a wide variety of topics
such as learning theories; teaching methods; motivation; cognitive, emotional,
and moral development; and parent/child relationships.
Learning can be defined as the relatively permanent change in an
individual's behavior or behavior potential (or capability) as a result of
experience or practice (i.e., an internal change inferred from overt
behavior). This can be compared with the other primary process producing
relatively permanent change--maturation--that results from biological
growth and development. Therefore, when a relatively permanent change in
ourselves or others, the primary cause was either maturation (biology) or
learning (experience), or, as is often the case, some combination of
both. As educators, there is nothing we can do to alter an individual's
biology; the only influence open to use is to provide an opportunity for
students to engage in experiences that will lead to relatively permanent change.
Teaching, then, can be thought of as the purposeful direction and
management of the learning process. Note that teaching is not giving
knowledge or skills to students; teaching is the process of providing guided
opportunities for students to produce relatively permanent change through the
engagement in experiences provided by the teacher.
In
summary, the primary purpose of schooling, which is only one of the
institutional influences in a person's education, is to assist the individual
to better develop his or her full potential as well as to develop the knowledge, attitudes, and skills
to interact with the environment in a successful manner. The family,
religious organizations, and community
also share primary responsibility in the educational process (see Huitt, 1999
for additional detail).
In
my opinion, parents and educators should be concerned at least with helping
students to develop individual capacities, acquire personal virtues, and
provide service to others. Developing capacities involves first identifying possible domains of performance
and then providing students opportunities to successfully develop their capacities
(i.e., to develop competence.)
The acquisition of virtues is generally concerned with moral character,
dealing with issues of the direction and quality of life and doing the right
thing (verses competence which is concerned with doing the thing right).
Providing service to others acknowledges that individuals grow and develop
within a social context and need to be concerned with positively interacting
with that context. All of these concern the development of a vision of who the person is as a human
being, the individual's expectations about what is possible, and more
specifically, the individual dreams, goals, and desires that one has for his or
her life. In an ideal society, the institutions of family, schools,
religious organizations, and communities would provide a coherent set of opportunities
for children and youth to engage in experiences that would result in high
levels of expertise in these three areas and an attitude of striving for
excellence in both individual and social development. However, the other major
influences on the child or youth may not be providing appropriate
opportunities. Therefore, educators (or school personnel) must be very
efficient when developing the specific goals and objectives that will be addressed in schools.
Educational
psychology provides important background knowledge that preservice and
inservice educators can use as the foundation for professional practice.
In combination with information on human growth and development and specific content
knowledge, information on theories of learning and pedagogy provide the
foundation for classroom and school methods and procedures. What you will
study in educational psychology is applicable to a wide variety of content- and
age-specific teaching activities.
My viewpoint
is that human beings are goal-seeking, teleological organisms. That is,
at their best, human beings do things for a reason or goal and strive to make
meanings of their lives. However, the process of learning in a particular
domain or content area is complex. Individuals develop a knowledge base
through conditioning
by the environment; they also actively construct
a knowledge base through their seeking information and thinking about the
subject based on their maturation and prior knowledge. When knowledge
(which may be either cognitively-
or affectively-based)
is purposely put into practice through an exercise of volition, conation, or will it leads to behavioral
competence and, through reflection, to wisdom.
From
my perspective, there is no single explanation of why people do what they
do. It is a combination of many factors, including the particular context
or situation. You will study these alternative influences so that you can
make better decisions as you guide young people to develop vision, character,
and competence, and provide service to others. At the undergraduate level,
the focus of educational psychology is on effective classroom practice,
primarily as defined by research. Theories of learning and other topics
are covered in a supplemental manner. The focus of the graduate-level courses
is to provide an overview of the major theories of learning and development and
how they can be applied in classroom settings. At this level, a model of
human behavior is presented and a discussion of the movement to the digital/conceptual age precedes an in-depth analysis of current theory and
research.
References
- Huitt, W. (1999). Implementing effective school achievement reform: Four principles. Paper presented at the School Counseling Summit, Valdosta State University, Valdosta, GA, April 20. Retrieved May 2001, from http://www.edpsycinteractive.org/papers/school-reform.pdf
- La Belle, T. (1982). Formal, nonformal and informal education: A holistic perspective on lifelong learning. International Review of Education, 28(2), 159-175.
- Wagner, T. (2008). The global achievement gap: Why even our best schools don’t teach the new survival skills our children need—and what we can do about it. New York, NY: Basic Books.
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