Educational Psychology – John W. Santrock, samenvatting begrippen
Chapter 1: Educational Psychology: A Tool For Effective Teaching
1.1: Exploring Educational Psychology
- Educational Psychology: The branch of psychology that specializes in
understanding teaching and learning in educational settings.
- Gifted (Hollingworth, 1916): Children who attained exceptionally high scores on
intelligence tests.
- Programmed learning (Skinner, 1954): Reinforcing the student after each of a
series of steps until the student reached a learning goal.
1.2: Effective Teaching
- Constructivist approach: A learner-centered approach to learning that emphasizes
the importance of individuals actively constructing knowledge and understanding with
guidance from the teacher.
- Collaboration: Children working with each other in their efforts to know and
understand.
- Direct instruction approach: A structured, teacher-centered approach characterized
by teacher direction and control, high teacher expectations for students on academic
tasks, and efforts by the teacher to keep negative affect to a minimum.
- Critical thinking: Thinking reflectively and productively and evaluating the evidence.
- Differentiated instruction: Involves recognizing individual variations in students’
knowledge, readiness, interests, and other characteristics, and taking these
differences into account when planning curriculum and engaging in instruction.
- Standards-based instruction: The extent to which instruction should be tied to
standards.
- Empowered learner: Students actively use technology to reach learning goals.
- Digital citizen: Students demonstrate responsibility and are ethical in their use of
technology.
- Knowledge constructor: Students use a variety of recourses and digital tools to
construct knowledge, become more creative, and engage in meaningful learning.
- Innovative designer: Students use various technologies to solve problems and craft
useful and imaginative solutions to these problems.
- Computational thinker: Students develop strategies in using technology to create
solutions and test them.
- Creative communicator: Students communicate effectively and think creatively in
their use of digital tools to attain goals.
- Global collaborator: Students use technology to widen their perspectives and
enhance their learning by connecting with others locally and globally.
1.3: Research in Educational Psychology
- Descriptive research: Has the purpose of observing and recording behaviour.
- Laboratory: A controlled setting from which many of the complex factors of the real
world have been removed.
- Naturalistic observation: Observation conducted in the real world rather than in a
laboratory.
- Participant observation: Observation conducted while the teacher-researcher is
actively involved as a participant in the activity or setting.
- Standardized tests: Tests with uniform procedures for administration and scoring.
They assess students’ performance in different domains and allow a student’s
performance to be compared with the performance of other students at the same age
or grade level on a national basis.
, - Accountability: Holding teachers and students responsible for student performance.
- Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI): Uses electromagnetic waves to
construct images of a person’s brain tissue and biochemical activity.
- Cortisol: A hormone produced by the adrenal gland that is linked to the body’s stress
level. It has been measured in studies of temperament, emotional reactivity, peer
relations, and child psychopathology.
- Case study: An in-depth look at an individual.
- Ethnographic study: In-depth description and interpretation of behaviour in an
ethnic or a cultural group that includes direct involvement with the participants.
- Focus group: involves interviewing people in a group setting, in most cases to obtain
information about a particular topic or issue.
- Correlational study: Research that describes the strength of the relation between
two or more events or characteristics. Correlation does not equal causation!
- Experimental research: Research that allows the determination of the causes of
behaviour and involves conducting an experiment, which is a carefully regulated
procedure in which one or more of the factors believed to influence the behaviour
being studied is manipulated and all others are held constant.
- Cause: The event that is being manipulated.
- Effect: The behaviour that changes because of the manipulation.
- Independent variable: The manipulated, influential, experimental factor in an
experiment. The label independent indicates that this variable can be changed
independently of any other factors.
- Dependent variable: The factor that is measured in an experiment. The label
dependent is used because the values of this variable depend on what happens to
the participants in the experiment as the independent variable is manipulated.
- Experimental group: The group whose experience is manipulated in an experiment.
- Control group: A group whose experience is treated in every way like the
experimental group except for the manipulated factor. This group serves as the
baseline against which the effects of the manipulated condition can be compared.
- Random assignment: The assignment of participants to experimental and control
groups by chance.
- Program evaluation research: Research designed to make decisions about the
effectiveness of a particular program.
- Action research: Research used to solve a specific classroom or school problem,
improve teaching and other educational strategies, or make a decision at a specific
location.
- Teacher-as-researcher: Also called teacher-researcher, this concept involves
classroom teachers conducting their own studies to improve their teaching practice.
- Quantitative research: Employs numerical calculations in an effort to discover
information about a particular topic, e.g. correlational and experimental research.
- Qualitative research: Involves obtaining information using descriptive measures
such as interviews, case studies, personal journals and diaries, and focus groups but
not statistically analysing the information.
- Mixed methods research: Involves research that blends different designs or
methods.
Chapter 2: Cognitive and Language Development
2.1: An Overview of Child Development
- Development: The pattern of biological, cognitive, and socioemotional processes
that begins at conception and continues through the life span. Most development
involves growth, although it also eventually involves decay (dying).
- Biological processes: Produce changes in the child’s body and underlie brain
development, height and weight gains, motor skills, and puberty’s hormonal changes.
, - Cognitive processes: Involve changes in the child’s thinking, intelligence, and
language.
- Socioemotional processes: Involve changes in the child’s relationships with other
people, changes in emotion, and changes in personality.
- Developmental cognitive neuroscience: Explores links between development,
cognitive processes, and the brain.
- Developmental social neuroscience: Examines connections between
socioemotional processes, development, and the brain.
- Infancy: Extends from birth to 18 to 24 months. It is a time of extreme dependence
on adults.
- Early childhood: Extend from the end of infancy to about 5 years. Children become
more self-sufficient, develop school readiness skills, and spend many hours with
peers.
- Middle and late childhood: Extends from about 6 to 11 years of age. Children
master the fundamental skills of reading, writing, and math, achievement becomes a
more central theme, and self-control increases.
- Adolescence: The developmental period that goes from childhood to adulthood,
beginning around ages 10 to 12 and ending in the late teens. Starts with rapid
physical changes, including height and weight gains, and development of sexual
functions. They intensely pursue independence and seek their own identity. Thought
becomes more abstract, logical, and idealistic.
- Emerging adulthood: Occurs from approximately 18 to 25 years of age.
Experimentation and exploration characterize this stage.
- Nature-nurture issue: Nature refers to an organism’s biological inheritance, nurture
to environmental influences. The ‘nature’ proponents claim biological inheritance is
the most important influence on development, the ‘nurture’ proponents claim
environmental experiences are the most important.
- Epigenetic view: Development is seen as an ongoing, bidirectional interchange
between heredity and the environment.
- Continuity-discontinuity issue: The issue regarding whether development involves
gradual, cumulative change (continuity, linked to nurture) or distinct stages
(discontinuity, linked to nature).
- Early-later issue: Involves the degree to which early experiences (especially infancy)
or later experiences are the key determinants of the child’s development.
- Splintered development: The circumstances in which development is uneven
across domains.
2.2: Cognitive Development
- Neuro-constructivist view: Emphasizes that brain development is influenced by
both biological processes and environmental experiences, the brain has plasticity and
depends on experience, and brain development is linked closely with cognitive
development. What children do can change the development of their brains.
- Myelination: The process of encasing many cells in the brain with a myelin sheath
that increases the speed a which information travels through the nervous system.
- Synapses: Tiny gaps between neurons where connections between neurons are
made.
- Pruning: Unused connections are replaced by other pathways or disappear.
- Prefrontal cortex: The highest level in the frontal lobes, involved in reasoning,
decision making, and self-control.
- Cognitive control: Involves flexible and effective control in a number of areas. These
include controlling attention, reducing interfering thoughts, inhibiting motor actions,
and flexibility in switching between competing choices.
- Corpus callosum: The brain region where fibers connect the left and right
hemispheres. Improves the ability to process information.
