When you mention psychology most people think of counselling as a treatment for emotional issues, such as anxiety or depression…. And while all psychologists have training in these areas, our team has specific postgraduate training in Educational and Developmental Psychology , which is a branch of psychology focused on learning and development.
This information enables us to gain insight into how children learn and process information and what their learning potential might be. And it enables us to recommend specific learning strategies and supports for home and school to help them to reach that potential. So Educational Psychologists work with children to find out HOW they learn and process information and look for ways to improve their performance.
Emotional issues, attitudes, motivation, self-regulation, behaviour and self-esteem all contribute to learning. A learning assessment is often the first step in the process. Educational psychologist Katy Goymour offers her advice on stress management at school. Something that I have done in the past to support myself with this is to write a list of what I am willing to compromise on and what I am absolutely NOT willing to compromise on in terms of my work-life balance. In school, I think that staff are their own biggest resource and source of peer support.
For example it could be useful if there was a buddy system in place, whereby staff have an assigned member of staff they can check in with periodically throughout the week to share one example of how they have been able to relax that week. Everyone is different in terms of the sorts of activities they may find relaxing — doing whatever they enjoy socially can be a really good way to connect with others.
An educational psychologist supports teachers by providing them with the space to sit and reflect about particular children and also offers different ways of helping them to problem-solve around systemic factors within their setting. Duties such as dealing with disorder in the classroom can take over other, more enjoyable parts of the job and means tasks not managed during the school day get taken home — negatively skewing work-life balance.
This is how an educational psychologist can help:. How chemists at Queen Mary University of London are helping secondary school science teachers include the contributions of BAME scientists in their teaching.
In a situation where a parent or school feels that a child's learning isn't progressing in the way they would want it to, and the child is becoming quite stuck with learning, an educational psychologist would be consulted. An educational psychologist's task is gathering as much information about an individual child as possible. So they would begin by taking quite a detailed history from the parent.
They want to know how a child has progressed through all of the developmental milestones, walking and talking for example, and then find out when things changed. They would then go into the nursery or school environment and do a very basic observation, too, where they will look at a child's interactions with other children, levels of language, and how they are generally - if they are confident, what things can trigger a change in behaviour.
Often you can see a child in an environment behaving calmly until they need to sit down and begin to do a task and you realise it is at that point that they really struggle. Lastly, is a consultation with the class teacher and the staff working with the child to get a broader sense of what the child is like in school. Each child develops at different rates and you have got to be able to pace learning at home. Research shows that prior knowledge influences both conceptual growth and conceptual change in students.
With conceptual growth, students add to their existing knowledge, and with conceptual change, students correct misconceptions or errors in existing knowledge. Facilitating conceptual growth or change requires first obtaining a baseline level of student knowledge prior to the start of each unit through formative assessment.
The results of this discussion can guide the selection of assignments and activities that will be appropriate for facilitating either conceptual growth or conceptual change.
Prior knowledge can be used to help students incorporate background knowledge and draw connections between units during the course. Research indicates that cognitive development and learning are not limited by general stages of development. Instructors can use this research to facilitate learning by designing instruction that utilizes scaffolding, differentiation and mixed ability grouping.
It is also critical that the most advanced students have the opportunity to work with others who will challenge them, including other students or the instructor. Learning is based on context, so generalizing learning to new contexts is not spontaneous, but rather needs to be facilitated. Student growth and deeper learning are developed when instructors help students transfer learning from one context to another. Students will also be better able to generalize learning to new contexts if instructors invest time in focusing on deeper learning.
One method of developing this skill is to have students use their understanding of a particular unit to generate potential solutions for real-world problems. This principle details empirically based strategies that will help students more effectively encode learned materials into long-term memory.
In addition to those in the memory unit, examples from this principle can help inform instruction throughout the course. By issuing formative assessment frequently through practice problems, activities and sample tests, instructors can help students increase their knowledge, skills and confidence.
Additionally, instructors conducting practice activities at spaced intervals distributed practice will help students achieve greater increases in long-term retrieval ability. Practice tests should include open-ended questions that require both the retrieval of existing knowledge and the challenge of applying that information to new situations or contexts, thus also incorporating principle four.
See also the APA teaching module on practice for knowledge acquisition. This principle highlights the importance of instructor responses and indicates the best manner in which to deliver feedback to students in order to maintain or increase motivation to learn.
Providing students with clear, explanatory and timely feedback is important for learning. Self-regulation skills, including attention, organization, self-control, planning and memory strategies, improve learning and engagement and can be taught through direct instruction, modeling and classroom organization. Teachers can model organizational methods and assist students by highlighting learning targets at the start and conclusion of lessons, using classroom calendars, highlighting difficult concepts that will require more practice, breaking large projects into manageable components, using well designed rubrics and allowing sufficient processing time through questioning, summarizing and practice.
Psychology students can apply this research to their own study habits such as learning to practice self-control by limiting the distractions presented by cell phones and social media. Students can also be encouraged to design experiments related to the limits of attention and discuss the practical implications of their results. Creativity is considered a critical skill for the technology driven world of the 21st century and because it is not a stable trait, it can be taught, nurtured and increased.
This principle describes specific methods of structuring assignments to increase creativity and ideas for how to model creative problem solving. Creativity in the psychology classroom can include opportunities for student-designed research projects, video projects, demonstrations and model building.
Students who are motivated and interested in learning are more successful.
0コメント