Educational Psychology [antikvár]

PREFACE When we wrote the first edition of this book in the early 1970s, the world was different in many ways. The cold war, the Vietnam experience, the hippies and flower children, the early period of space explorations-all seem today to belong to a long-past era, to ancient history. On the other hand, from the standpoint of educational psychology, we continue to see many of the same issues, perhaps phrased in somewhat different language, yet highly parallel. The foundation of educational practice is still too often based on anecdote or even a transient fad without substance. Then, it was fashionable to speak of personal traits of openness, spontaneity, and "do your own thing." Now we hear of character virtues such as honesty, trust, and responsibility. Then, we heard of creativity; now it is test score achievement. Then, the trend was for more centralized curriculum efforts; now it seems to be for more decentralization and charter schools. The educational pendulum continues to swing. From our view, however, such swings do not always represent real progress. The difficulty often results from an inadequate basis for such changes in practice. In fact, given the increased complexity and diversity of our school populations, we need educational practices that are more than ever based on solid theory and research, and vice versa: practical theory and theoretical practice. Through successive revisions of our text, we have always worked toward this goal. This, our seventh edition continues this effort to provide educatorsteachers, counselors, and administrators with the latest information base for the teaching-learning process. We decided to continue to build a developmental framework for education. It is our view that such an enterprise is too important to be left in the hands of overly theoretical, faddish, or anecdotal "educationist" practice. For continuity, we've retained and expanded features from previous editions, namely the chapter summaries, the extensive glossary entries, many Spotlights on contemporary issues, extensive biographies, and end-of-the-chapter theory to practice assignments. In the chapters focused on the domains of development, you'll find the latest information on the constructivist approach, including cognitive, morál, and personal identity. As one of the major theorists in this country, John Flavell, has noted, despite somé shortcomings there is simply no adequate alternative to this approach. This means it is extremely important to understand the learning process with particular reference to Vygotsky's zone of proximal growth. Equally significant is the newest research on identity status development as an educative goal, even more so for students from culturally deprived backgrounds. It is clearly time to help such students get off, in Don Locke's phrase, "ethnic probation." These chapters present the latest research and practice supporting our approach to morál development. They thus form the building blocks, a basis for constructing effective teaching and learning methods. In the sections on learning, we have devoted more coverage to the information processing framework of metacognition, episodic memory, schemata, and attention deficits. In the testing chapter we introduce new concepts, such as race norming and gender-equity testing. New spotlights have been added, including coverage of such issues as Ebonics, gender bias, single-sex schools, the gifted, self-esteem, conduct disorders, and sex education. Given the increased diversity in the student population, we continue to ask how teachers can deal with the increased diversity in their classrooms and schools. In this edition we have added emphasis on teachers learning about the home communities of their students with examples from Shirley Brice Heath's research and that of K. Tsianina Lomawaima. New biographies of Linda Darling-Hammond and James Comer focus on the work being done nationwide on the issues of teaching quality and educational equity for all students. New sections on restructuring schools focus on reorganization of the school environment to meet the needs of all students as we move into the next century. We emphasize the new work in school-university partnerships and professional-development schools, where experienced teachers and administrators, beginning teachers, and university professors are