Educational Psychology

676 EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY Ohio; and San Antonio, Texas. They are unusually Conant, James Bryant. 1959. The American High controversial because their subsidy may pierce the School Today. New York: McGraw-Hill. conventional First Amendment prohibition of pub- Coons, John E.; Clune, William H., III; and Sug- lic funding in support of religious causes. In June arman, Stephen D. 1970. Private Wealth and 2000 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that students in Public Education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Cleveland may use state-funded vouchers to pay tu- University Press. ition at private schools, including schools with a reli- Gardner, John W. 1961. Excellence: Can We Be gious affiliation. The decision in this case is likely to Equal and Excellent Too? New York: Harper and have a significant policy impact for years to come. Row. Conclusion Hayek, Friedrich A. von. 1960. The Constitution Will accountability efforts succeed in elevating U.S. of Liberty. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. school performance? Will colleges and universities Kaufman, Herbert. 1963. Politics and Policies in eventually be subjected to the same kind of efficiency State and Local Governments. Englewood Cliffs, requirements experienced by public schools? Will NJ: Prentice-Hall. the achievement gap between middle- and lower in- National Commission on Excellence in Educa- come students be narrowed? Will public funding of tion. 1983. A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for private and religious schools eventually be approved, Educational Reform. Washington, DC: U.S. and, if so, will such arrangements prove the undoing Government Printing Office. of the great American socialization engine, public Rudolf, Frederick, ed. 1969. Essays on Education schooling? in the New Republic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard There is no effort here at predicting the out- University Press. come of such queries. The answers will come in time Wise, Arthur E. 1968. Rich Schools, Poor Schools: and, no doubt, will be the subject of future analysis The Promise of Equal Educational Opportunity. and comment. What is predictable, however, is that Chicago: University of Chicago Press. the significance of education for society will only in- crease and that government will continue to be chal- Yudof, Mark. 1973. ‘‘Equal Educational Opportu- lenged by continually having to strike a new balance nity and the Courts.’’ Texas Law Review 51:411– among the advocates of greater equality, efficiency, 437. and liberty. James W. Guthrie See also: Education Reform; Efficiency in Edu- cation; Financial Support of Schools; Govern- ment and Education, the Changing Role of; Multicultural Education; School Reform; EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY Special Education. Educational psychologists ‘‘study what people think and do as they teach and learn a particular curricu- BIBLIOGRAPHY lum in a particular environment where education Bailyn, Bernard. 1967. The Ideological Origins of and training are intended to take place’’ (Berliner, p. the American Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Har- 145). The work of educational psychologists focuses vard University Press. ‘‘on the rich and significant everyday problems of education’’ (Wittrock, pp. 132–133). Barker, Roger G., and Gump, Paul V. 1964. Big School, Small School. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford History University Press. Long before educational psychology became a for- Callahan, Raymond E. 1960. Education and the mal discipline, scholars were concerned about what Cult of Efficiency. Chicago: University of Chica- people think and do as they teach and learn. The go Press. Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle discussed Coleman, James S., et al. 1966. Equality of Educa- topics still studied by educational psychologists— tional Opportunity. Washington, DC: National the role of the teacher, the relationship between Center for Educational Statistics. teacher and student, methods of teaching, the nature EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY 677 and order of learning, the role of affect in learning. Psychology and key ideas in education. Develop- In the 1500s the Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives ments in education continued to be closely tied to emphasized the value of practice, the need to tap stu- psychologists in the first half of the twentieth centu- dent interests and adapt instruction to individual ry. In fact, in 1919, Ellwood Cubberly dubbed edu- differences, and the advantages of using self- cational psychology a ‘‘guiding science of the comparisons rather than competitive social compar- school’’ (p. 755). It was not uncommon for psychol- isons in evaluating students’ work. In the 1600s the ogists such as Thorndike, Charles H. Judd, or their Czech theologian and educator Johann Amos Co- students to be both presidents of the American Psy- menius introduced visual aids and proclaimed that chological Association and authors of materials for understanding, not memorizing, was the goal of teaching school subjects or measuring achievement teaching. Writings of European philosophers and re- in reading, mathematics, or even handwriting. The formers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712– work of Thorndike, Alfred Binet, Jean Piaget, and 1778), Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746–1827), Jo- Benjamin Bloom illustrate earlier connections be- hann Friedrich Herbart (1776–1841), and Friedrich tween psychology and education. Wilhelm August Froebel (1782–1852) stressed the Thorndike, teaching, and transfer. Although value of activity, prior experience, and interest. All Thorndike is most well known in psychology for his these ideas are consistent with current work in edu- research on learning that paved the way for B. F. cational psychology. Skinner’s later studies of operant conditioning, his In the United States, psychology was linked to impact in education went beyond his studies of education and teachers from its inception. In 1890 learning. He developed methods for teaching read- the American philosopher William James founded ing and arithmetic that were widely adopted, as well psychology in America and then followed with a lec- as scales to measure ability in reading, arithmetic, ture series for teachers titled ‘‘Talks to Teachers handwriting, drawing, spelling, and English compo- about Psychology.’’ These lectures were given in sition. He supported the scientific movement in ed- summer schools for teachers around the country and ucation—an effort to base teaching practice on then published in 1899 both as a book and in the At- empirical evidence and sound measurement. His lantic Monthly magazine. Again, some of James’s view proved narrow as he sought laws of learning in ideas were quite modern—he supported the use of laboratories that could be applied to teaching with- discussion, projects and activities, laboratory experi- out actually evaluating the applications in real class- ments, writing, drawing, and concrete materials in rooms. It took fifty years to return to the teaching. psychological study of learning in the classroom, James’s student, G. Stanley Hall, founded the when the Soviet Union’s successful launch of Sput- American Psychological Association and was its first nik in 1957 startled the United States and precipitat- president. Teachers helped him collect data for his ed funding for basic and applied research on dissertation about children’s understandings of the teaching and learning. Thorndike also had a lasting world. Hall founded the child-study movement in effect on education by demonstrating that learning the United States and wrote extensively about chil- Greek, Latin, and mathematics did not ‘‘exercise the dren and adolescents. He encouraged teachers to mind’’ to improve general thinking abilities. Partly make detailed observations and keep careful records because of his research, required study of the classics to study their students’ development—as his mother decreased. had done when she was a teacher. Hall’s ideas influ- Binet and assessments of intelligence. About enced education through courses in child study in- the time that Thorndike was developing measures of troduced into normal schools beginning around reading and arithmetic abilities, Alfred Binet was 1863. working on the assessment of intelligence in France. Hall’s student, John Dewey, founded the Labo- Binet, a psychologist and political activist in Paris in ratory School at the University of Chicago and is the early 1900s, was charged with developing a pro- considered the father of the Progressive education cedure for identifying students who would need spe- movement. Another of William James’s students, cial education classes. He believed that having an Edward Lee Thorndike, wrote the first educational objective measure of learning ability could protect psychology text in 1903 and founded the Journal of students of poor families who might be forced to Educational Psychology in 1910. leave school because they were assumed to be slow 678 EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY learners. Binet and his collaborator Théodore Simon in some form. The cognitive domain taxonomy was identified fifty-eight tests, several for each age group revised in 2001 by Lorin W. Anderson and David R. from three to thirteen, that allowed the examiner to Krathwohl. determine a mental age for a child. A child who suc- Moving toward contemporary educational psy- ceeded on the items passed by most six-year-olds, chology. In the 1960s a number of educational psy- for example, was considered to have a mental age of chologists developed approaches to teaching that six, whether the child was actually four, six, or eight foreshadowed some of the contemporary applica- years old. The concept

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