With the changing demographics (e.g., increasing Hispanic
population and increasing number of students from low socio-economic
households) of the K-12 classroom, how can educational psychology assist
teachers with creating an effective learning environment and improving student
achievement?
Ormrod: An essential first step is to enhance teachers’ understandings
of students’ every-day life circumstances, including students’ physical and
social environments, cultural practices, and (often implicit) cultural
worldviews. This step is easier said than done, as teachers at all
levels—including ourselves!—tend to have trouble looking outside their own
belief systems and ways of doing things to acknowledge that other beliefs and
ways of doing things might be just as “good” or “right” (with some exceptions,
obviously). As Barbara Rogoff has put it, “Like the fish that is unaware of
water until it has left the water, people often take their own community’s ways
of doing things for granted.”
As
teacher educators, we can’t possibly engender complete awareness and
understanding of diverse social and cultural groups in a single semester, but
we can make a good start by engaging students in conversations with people from
varying backgrounds, ideally outside the classroom and, even better, outside
the local community. As an illustration, I once took a group of teacher
in-terns on a day-long field trip to an inner-city K–8 school that served
predominantly low-income immigrant families. We were able to observe the truly
inspiring things the school was doing for students and their families, but we
also heard stories from the principal and teachers about the many challenges
some of their students faced—quite eye-opening.
But,
our strategies must extend well beyond show-and-tell activities. In our
educational psychology courses, we must regularly integrate social and cultural
diversity into the topics we discuss, the questions we ask, the assignments we
give, and the ways in which we assess our own students’ learning and achievement.
True multicultural education doesn’t come to a halt at Grade 12; it must also
continue throughout higher education, including teacher education.
Reese-Weber: Instructors teaching educational psychologist need to
understand themselves the difficulties among underrepresented populations. For
example, I was awarded a small grant at my university to redesign my
educational psychology course to include more information on urban education.
This redesign included spending three days my-self in a underrepresented
com-munity observing at the schools and interacting with the community leaders.
Now, I take students to that same community for a day to observe in the schools
and participant in the community. In addition, research should focus on
determining what characteristics exist in current, successful schools system
within underrepresented populations.
McInerney: Educational
Psychology, as well being a cognate discipline, distils from a range of ‘psychologies’
such as developmental and personality psychology, principles by which educators
may understand the learning and teaching processes. Over the last decades there
has been an increasing interest in, and attention to, the diversity of
learners, and that a ‘one size fits all’ approach to creating an effective
learning environment is no longer considered optimal. Good contemporary
educational psychology textbooks emphasize the need to engage in research/ evidence-based
practices to enhance effective and diverse learning environments for all
students in order to improve student achievement (e.g., McInerney, D. M. (2013)
Educational Psychology: Constructing Learning (Pearson 6th Edition)).
Teachers concerned with potentially marginalized and underperforming groups
have a wealth of research-based techniques at their finger-tips if they read
the appropriate professional literature and, in particular, read contemporary
educational psychology text-books, and books in specialized areas, such as
enhancing motivation, understanding information processing, and so on.
Eggen: Educational psychology has much
to offer with respect to the increasing diversity of our students. For
instance, educational psychology helps us understand that students’ new
learning depends on their existing background knowledge and experiences, and
students will bring widely varying backgrounds with them to our classrooms. If
students lack the school-related experiences needed to succeed academically,
teachers must provide these experiences in the form of high-quality examples
and other representations that will provide the necessary background needed to
help students understand the topics teachers are teaching. The need to provide
these experiences is particularly important for students who come from low
socio-economic households because these students often lack the school-related
experiences needed to prepare them for success in school.
Reese-Weber: Educational psychologists need to emphasis research findings
that support the idea that teaching critical thinking skills will enhance
standardized test performance.
McInerney: I am not sure the premise that emphasizing improving
standardized test scores implies that classroom instruction becomes
teacher-centered and involves rote memorization. Data on this would need to be
provided to convince me that this is the case. Improving standardized test
scores in not inimical to engaging in ‘best practice’ in teaching, and
assist-ing students to become critical thinkers. This question is essentially
one regarding appropriate pedagogy, which is related to, but not identical
with, educational psychology. Educational psychology informs pedagogical
practices and teachers should be mindful of the wealth of insights into
effective learning and teaching that are provided by research related to
learning strategies, information processing, motivation, self-regulation,
metacognition, constructivism, and so on. There are more ways to skin a cat
than one, and many routes to enhanced standardized test scores than resorting
to teacher-centered classrooms and rote memorization. I think well prepared
teachers are quite aware of this.
Eggen: Educational psychology can assist
teachers with teaching content in two essential ways. First, it can help
teachers understand the way students learn most effectively, and, as teachers
better understand the learning process, they will also understand that rote
memorization is not the most effective way to help students perform well on
standardized tests. So, by emphasizing critical thinking and the deep
understanding of topics, teachers are both increasing their students’ long-term
learning and increasing the likelihood that their students will perform well on
standardized tests.
Simply
understanding the way students learn isn’t enough however. Teachers need to see
theories of learning directly and concretely applied to standards teachers are
expected to help their students meet, and topics teachers are actually
teaching. We all know that transfer is very specific. Believing that the role
of educational psychology is to teach theory, and teachers should learn specific
applications of the theories in their methods courses is misguided; it doesn’t
happen. If educational psychology is to help teachers effectively meet standards
and go beyond rote memorization, they must understand learning, development,
and motivation, and they must also have experiences—in their educational
psychology courses—in applying these theories with real-world standards and
topics. If teachers don’t have experiences with application, the theories
taught in educational psychology classes won’t transfer. This helps us
under-stand why we see the emphasis on teacher-centered instruction and rote
memorization in the P-12 world.
Ormrod:
One common misconception,
even among teachers, is that rote memorization is the best strategy for doing
well on standardized achievement tests and other high-stakes assessments. For
instance, I once co-taught a middle school studies class with a teacher whom I
overheard telling a struggling student, “It’s easy. You just memorize it!”
Something
I’ve routinely done in my classes and as an occasional guest speaker in other
teacher education programs is to try to dispel this myth, often by conducting
little in-class “experiments” in which some students are able to learn new material
meaningfully and elaboratively while others have little choice but to resort to
relatively meaningless learning; the differences between the two groups’
performances are usually pretty dramatic. Then, I continue to hammer away at
the point that the human brain and mind are not tape recorders or video
cameras, nor are they sponges that “soak up” information—instead, they’re
active meaning-makers, and their “owners” (i.e., human learners) can be
systematically taught how to make meaning more strategically and effectively. That said, we need to note the increasing trend of
standardized tests away from factual knowledge and toward higher-level
thinking skills. The wide-spread adoption of the Common Core standards is
certainly helping us move in that direction. Anyone who hasn’t looked at these
standards should do so (www.corestandards.org). A lot of the paranoia about
Common Core—and many residents in my own small town in New Hampshire are
paranoid to the point of being hysterical—comes from ignorance about the nature
and origins of these standards.
BIOGRAPHIES OF THE FEATURED
AUTHORS
Paul Eggen has worked in higher education for nearly 40 years. He
is a consultant for public schools and colleges in his university service area
and has provided support to teachers in 12 states. Paul has also worked with
teach-ers in international schools in 23 countries in Africa, South Asia, the
Middle East, Central America, South America, and Eu-rope. He has published
several articles in national journals, is the co-author or co-editor of seven
books, and presents regularly at national and international conferences. Paul
is strongly committed to pub-lic education. His wife is a middle school teacher
in a public school, and his two children are graduates of public schools and
state universities.
Marla
Reese-Weber is a
Professor in the Psychology Department at Illinois State University. She
received her Bachelor’s degree in Psychology and Master’s degree in Clinical
Psycholo-gy at Illinois State Universi-ty. Marla went to The Ohio State
University and re-ceived her doctorate degree in Human Development and Family Science.
Her research interests continue to be on how the family context influences
adoles-cents and emerging adults (i.e., 18-27 year olds), spe-cifically their
romantic rela-tionships. Marla has taught several undergraduate and graduate
courses in her department, but the two she has most often taught are
Educational Psychology and Adolescent Develop-ment. Dr. Reese-Weber is the
co-author of an educa-tional psychology textbook, EdPsych Modules, that
provides a modular ap-proach and includes multi-ple case studies.
Professor
Dennis M. McInerney began
his ca-reer as a primary and second-ary teacher in Sydney, Austral-ia. He
joined a teachers college in 1975 as a lecturer and pro-gressed from there to a
variety of academic, administrative, and research posts at the Uni-versity of
Western Sydney, The National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological
Univer-sity, Singapore, and The Hong Kong Institute of Education. Professor
McInerney began his research career with his B.Ed and M.Ed (Hons) theses
exam-ining the development of multi-culturalism within Australian schools. This
work was fol-lowed by his doctoral research examining the motivational
determinants of school achieve-ment for non-traditional Abo-riginal students in
New South Wales. From these early re-search roots, Professor McIner-ney
developed an extensive research agenda examining motivation, learning, and
self-processes among a diverse range of cultural groups, in-cluding urban
Indigenous Abo-riginal and remote Indigenous Aboriginal groups in the North-ern
Territory of Australia, Nav-ajo and Yavapai Indians in the United States,
Chinese in Hong Kong, Malays, Chinese and South Asians in Singapore, and
Lebanese and other immigrant groups in Australia. The major focus of these
studies has been the psychological determinants of school engagement of
under-achieving minority groups. A range of competitive grants has supported
these studies. Pro-fessor McInerney has published over 300 research articles,
edits two international research series, Research on Sociocul-tural
Influences on Motivation and Learning (Vols 1-10) and International
Advances in Self Research (Vols 1-4). He has written major textbooks,
in-cluding Educational Psycholo-gy: Constructing Learning (Pearson 6th
Edition, 2013), Helping Kids Achieve Their Best: Understanding and Us-ing
Motivation in the Class-room (Allen & Unwin, 2000 and republished by
Infor-mation Age Publishing, 2005), and Publishing Your Psycholo-gy Research
(Sage and Allen & Unwin, 2001).
Jeanne Ellis Ormrod is currently Professor Emerita of Psychological
Sciences at the University of Northern Colorado. The “Emerita” means that she
officially retired from her position there, but she isn’t really retired
at all. After return-ing to her native New Eng-land in 1998, she taught several
courses at the Uni-versity of New Hampshire as an adjunct professor, and she
continues to give occa-sional guest lectures else-where. But. she now devotes
most of her time to updating and (she hopes) improving her textbooks, including
Human Learning, Essen-tials of Educational Psychol-ogy, Educational
Psycholo-gy: Developing Learners, and Practical Research.
FACTS AND FIGURES
75.5%
of public high school students gradu-ated on time in 2008-2009.
8
states and the District of Columbia had a less than 70% graduation
rate in 2008-2009.
There were 132,200 schools in the U.S. in 2009-2010.
19%
of students attend-ed high-poverty public schools in 2009-2010.
In
2011, 24% of U.S. public school students were Hispanic. That percentage is
expected to increase to 30% in 2023.
For 24 states and the District of Columbia, at least 50% of their
schools did not make AYP in 2011.
Percentage of public schools
that do not make AYP varies by state, from 11% in Wis-consin to 89% in
Flori-da in 2011.
(Sources:
NCES & CEP)
