Lecture 15- Educational Psychology

Question 1

What is the fundamental role of an educational psychologist?

Answer 1

They help us understand how people learn and what can be done to support individuals with their learning.

Question 2

What is an educational psychologist also called sometimes?

Answer 2

A school psychologist

Question 3

How do educational psychologists view the environment of the child?

Answer 3

The context/ environment of the child is critical to the child’s behaviour so they take a holistic approach talking to everyone who has influence in the child’s life to see how things can be changed to best support the child in their education. They may also consider the socioeconomic situation to get a bigger picture.

Question 4

Do educational psychologists generally focus on the positive aspects or negative aspects of the child’s behaviour?

Answer 4

Focus on the positive and praise/ encourage these to therefore decrease the negative behaviours

Question 5

True or false educational psychologists use evidence based practice…. what does this mean?

Answer 5

Yes they do. Means they draw on current research/ theories in psychology to inform their decisions and practice.

Question 6

At what ‘level’ do educational psychologists work at?

Answer 6

At all levels.
At the individual level they can have impact on a specific child
At an organization level they can make broad changes to institutions and thus help many as opposed to 1.

Question 7

When did educational psychology start to exist as a distinct field?

Answer 7

Early 18 to 19th century

Question 8

What four psychologists had a large impact on the field of educational psychology?

Answer 8

• Herbert: found formal steps to learning which invovled teachers first reviewing what students know and then showing how new material relates to this old material.
• Witmer: was the first to use evidence based interventions in that he work with children who had difficulties in school and figured out a specific approach method e.g. testing child
• Binet: came up with the intelligence test as an educational tool to help students with special needs in the classroom (what the IQ test is currently was not what was it was intended to be)
• Piaget: looked at cognitive development as he discovered that children’s brains worked very differently to adults. Discovered this while marking Binet’s intelligence test.

Question 9

What are the four important sub areas of educational psychology + brief description of what they are?

Answer 9

• Cognitive: thinking, memory + how these processes occur that are essential to learning
• Behavioural: Used to monitor classroom behaviour, ideas of praise + punishment and operant conditioning prominent
• Social cognitive theory: The idea that we learn from the actions of others e.g. seeing someone punished for an action makes us less likely to do it ourselves
• Humanism: focused on the experience of learning rather than test measures (different to other 3 methods which focus primarily on outcomes)

Question 10

What is metacognition? How is it essential for education psychology?

Answer 10

Understanding our own thoughts. We need to understand how we best learn.

Question 11

What are JOLs? Why are they important?

Answer 11

Stands for judgements of learning. We need to have accurate interpretation of what we know so that we can go back and revise/ relearn the stuff we don’t. It also prevents us wasting time/ resources of things we are already confident in.

Question 12

In research how do we often measure JOLs?

Answer 12

Ask participants to learn new information and then report how well they think they would do in a test e.g. language (need to not already be familiar) or novel word associations

Question 13

According to Koriat, 1997 what are the three types of cues that influence JOLs?

Answer 13

• Intrinsic
• Extrinsic
• Mnemonic

Question 14

What was the results of Koriat’s 1997 study involving JOLs?

Answer 14

Manipulated: is material hard or easy to learn?
Easy= already an association between word pairs
Hard= no previous association between word pairs

Study 1: Participants predicted they would be better at learning easier material as opposed to hard and they were right, JOLs= accurate

Study 2: Participants asked to learn two different word lists one after other. JOLs go down for the second list as they think they will have more to learn and so will remember less. However, this is a false assumption as simply having the 1st task and attempting to remember words improved their strategies to learn the second words pairs. This shows JOLs are not always accurate which has an application for students studying (could lead to failure).

Question 15

According to Dunlosky et al, 2013 what are some common study techniques?

Answer 15

• Re-reading
• Highlighting
• Summarization
• Self explanation
• Elaborative integration (learning why a concept is correct or not)
• Imagery for text
• Key word mnemonic (Associate a specific concept with one word)
• Practice testing
• Distributed testing (implementing a schedule that spread study out)
• Interleaved practice (Mixing content up with other activities e.g. study PSYC210 content for bit then study PSYC212 content)

Question 16

What does distributed practice contrast with?

Answer 16

Mass practice: cramming/ learning everything at once.

Question 17

What four things did Dunlosky et al. 2013 think was important in order to determine how well a study technique generalized to different situations i.e. how effective it was?

Answer 17

• The type of material being learnt
• Criterion tasks (how is the testing being carried out?)
• Student characteristics (motivation, interest)
• Learning conditions (are the techniques still effective at any time of day, study space, group/ individual study etc. )

Question 18

What study techniques are considered to be highly effective according to Dunlosky et al.?

Answer 18

• Practice testing and distributed practice are best across range of situations
• Especially if combine these

Question 19

What have researchers found about the optimal spacing while using distributed practice?

Answer 19

Found that optimal was 20 to 30% of retention time. The longer you need to retain the information the more time you should have between sessions.

Question 20

What study techniques are considered moderately effective by Dunlosky et al.?

Answer 20

• Interweaved practice (forces you distribute them: so benefits could be due to this rather than the technique of interweaving itself?)
• Elaborative interrogation (well for factual knowledge if have relevant prior knowledge: doesn’t work for all learners/ situations)
• Self-explanation (students need to be trained to use effectively.

Question 21

What study techniques are considered low (1) in effectiveness by Dunlosky et al.?

Answer 21

• Work well but only in specific contexts
• Imagery (have to be able to formulate image for the concepts therefore abstract concepts don’t work, some people struggle with this skill)
• Key word mnemonics (names, definitions)
• Summarization depends on content and also the skill of student in writing summaries.

Question 22

What study techniques are considered not useful at all by Dunlosky et al.?

Answer 22

Re-reading and highlighting. Can actually impair your performance!

Question 23

How does re-reading as a technique lead to a false sense of security?

Answer 23

When reading all information is readily available, we think we know everything and get a false sense of security

Question 24

In the required reading by Karpicke what was the testing effect?

Answer 24

The testing effect describes the fact that students who have been tested on material remember more in the long term than if they had repeatedly studied it. Retrieving information from memory has a large effect on learning.

Question 25

In the required reading by Karpicke which study strategies did students report preferring? Are these strategies evidence based/ good?

Answer 25

• Repeated reading was by far the most frequently listed strategy with 84% of students reporting it. 55% of students reported that rereading was the number one strategy they used when studying.
• After that came practice problems (42.9%) and Flashcards (40.1%)= could be examples of self- testing but also not depending on how students are using them, are the simply reading the flashcards over and over or are they actively testing themselves? The Study should have asked them to elaborate.
• Only 11% of students (19 of 177) reported that they practiced retrieval (self-testing) while studying.
• In question 2 participants were asked to explain what study strategy they would use to recall inform from a textbook chapter: would they simply re-read the chapter, or would they self-test (with no option to go back and restudy the chapter). Most choose option A.
• Even those who self-test don’t seem to actually know the benefits i.e. testing alone is more effective than the same amount of time re-reading. Rather they tend to do it because it will help re-reading/ study in the future if they know what they don’t know. In other words they are not aware of the testing effect.
• So their strategies are not evidence based and often lead to a false sense of security. They believe they know the information better than they actually do because when they re-read it is more fluent/ accessible.