Lecture1
2023. szeptember 5., kedd 16:24
What is educational psychology?
○ Educational psychology is the branch of psychology concerned with the scientific study of
human learning.
○ The study of learning processes, from different perspectives, allows us to understand
individual differences in intelligence, cognitive development, affect, motivation, self-
regulation, and self-concept, as well as their role in learning.
→ Perspectives and other topics are also discussed in the preteaching lectures
○ Research: To explore issues, to shape policy, to improve practice
Topics in educational psychology
○ Learning and cognition
○ Behavior modification
○ Development
○ Individual differences
○ Motivation
○ Metacognition and self-regulation
○ Learning in context: cooperation and community
○ Boundaries between formal and informal learning
- Goals: enhance learning, instructional design, learning, classroom management, assessment
- Describe learning (‘qualitative’): observation, questionnaires, interviews, case studies
- Explain learning: controlled experiments, laboratory situations
When we talk about learning…
○ Who is learning? Age, personality, motivation, background
○ What are they learning? Domain, prior knowledge, (perceived) ability
○ How are they learning it? Study methods, alone or group, technology
○ What is the effect of learning? Effectiveness, transfer
About psychology
○ The scientific study of mind and behavior
○ Much progress in the 20th century, and ongoing (but there have been crises, too)
○ Huge influence on educational science
○ Lots of miths about psychology, but these intuitons can be wrong -> these can impact
education
- Past: about the soul than conscious than behaviour
○ Discipline searched for subject and method for a long time
Different method (from relation between how people perceive the world and what
really happens to, science of introspection)
Experimental: psychophysics, introspection (study of consciousness)
Non-experimental (pseudoscience): psychoanalysis
- Now: study of mind (brain) and behavior
o Nowadays: relevant and important
Can knowledge about human learning inform or influence education?
○ If we don’t know how we learn, how on earth do we know how to teach? Rafael Reif
(President of MIT)
○ Mobile game-based leaning? -> needs more research
,Piaget: when you teach a child something you take away forever his chance of discovering it for
himself
○ Conclusion: by understanding how and under what conditions children learn best, we can
improve teaching and learning
○ By understanding what works and what does not work, we can also improve teaching and
learning
The Brain
Research methods
○ Dead organsims
○ Brain damage, lesions
Now people with brain damage can stay alive, talk about it
Frontal lobotomy
○ Scanning and imaging: eeg, fMRI, PET
○ TMS: transcranial magnetic stimulation
Ongoing effort: human neuronal excitation/inhibiton balance explains and predicts neurostimulation
induced learning benefits
○ Electrical noise stimulation of parts of the brain increases cortical excitability - which improves
math learning
○ Effective for individuals with lowe cortical excitability
○ Research in very early stages: risk for getting overly excited
Major brain areas
○ Corpus callosum: bridge between the two brain hemispheres
○ Dutch education: only stimulates the left hemisphere
, Neurons and synapses
○ Neurons communicate thru synapses,
- Learning in this sense means
○ Creating new connections, and deleting already existing ones -> changing connections
between neurons
○ Synapses: change the amount of neurotransmitter that they produce
○ And many other way, some yet unknown
- Neural development
○ Importance of pruning: infants have the most synapses, but with age, we start getting less
○ Getting rid of unused parts
○
- Brain development
○ Envirometnal stimulation is very important: critical and sensitive periods
○ Difference betweem basic abilities and school learning
○ Much experience can partly make up for closed period: brain plasticity
- Brain platicity
○ Experience-expectant
○ Experience-dependent
- Experience-expectant
○ Normal brain expects to have these experiences, Normal environment sufficient for normal
brain development
○ Quality is not important, stimuli just need to be there
○ Bad enviromental input: irretrievable loss -> dependent on age
○ Example: senses (vision, hearing), language, attachment?
- Experince-dependent
, ○ Development depends on quality of enviromental input
○ Bad enviromental input: damage, but can be remedied, and its not dependent on age
○ Examples: (quality of) language, socio-emotional development, ... musical skills?
- Challenge
○ Brain puts constraints on learning, many parts of the brain have evolved to handle specific
functions
○ How are we then able to learn completely new cultural inventions, such as reading? What
existing parts of the brain handle reading?
○ The experience-expectant and experience-dependent concepts don’t answer this question
- Alternative: neuronal recycling
○ Challenge: how can culture evolve in evolutionary ‘old’ brains?
○ Novel functions invade old brain areas that have a similar function - hipothesis by DeHaene
○ For example: learning to read (recent cultural invention) invades the area of object
recognition. Kicks out/moves existing function: face recognition
○
Brain and school learning - consolidation
○ Short-term: synaptic consolidation
○ Long-term: systems consolidation
○ Different methods for promoting consolidation (biological and cognitive)
Importance of learning when youre not learning
○ Cognitive factor: retrieval practice
○ Biological factor: sleep
○ Other factors: nutrition, physical activitiy, circadian rythm
Implications for human learning (DeHaene)
○ Take advantage of the brains sensitve periods
○ Enrich the environment (rich versus poor, risk of perpetuating cycle)
○ Practice regularly
○ Let students sleep (after class)
Left brain – right brain?
○ Sometimes associated with learning styles (a ‘left brain learner’) – or idea that we have a
dominant side
○ Sometimes tied to Western versus Eastern thought
○ The brain’s hemispheres are not separate at all – although they appear to be (and can be
separated)
○ This may influence/bias teachers
Men brain versus women brain?
○ There are differences (e.g. size)
○ Differences in performance (math, language): culture, not brain
, ○ Learning, multitasking: no difference
○ We tend to focus on differences between groups, not within groups
○ This may influence/bias teachers
Implications
○ Losing the brain cells is not a problem: even desirable
○ Enriched environments enhance development
○ Myths about the brain are still very persistent: reason may be self-fulfilling prophecies
○ Brain research confirms and helps other learning theories. No direct relation with teaching
practice (yet)
