Educational Psychology and Child Development: Applied, Not Abstract
This domain is applied. Most items describe a child or a classroom and ask what the teacher should do, or test whether you can place a behaviour in the correct developmental stage or learning theory.
Development
- Growth is quantitative and measurable; development is qualitative and lifelong.
- Piaget: sensorimotor (0-2, object permanence); preoperational (2-7, egocentrism, animism, no conservation); concrete operational (7-11, conservation, reversibility, classification); formal operational (11+, abstract and hypothetico-deductive reasoning).
- Vygotsky: zone of proximal development and scaffolding; social speech becomes inner speech.
- Kohlberg: pre-conventional, conventional, post-conventional moral reasoning; Erikson: psychosocial stages across the lifespan.
Learning and motivation
- Pavlov (classical conditioning), Skinner (operant; reinforcement strengthens, punishment weakens), Thorndike's laws of readiness, exercise and effect, Kohler (insight), Bandura (observational learning).
- Maslow's hierarchy; intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation; Ebbinghaus forgetting curve.
Worked example
A 10-year-old has a mental age of 12. Ratio IQ = (12 / 10) x 100 = 120, above average. Reasoning: Stern's formula uses mental age over chronological age. It is a ratio IQ and is not applied to adults; adult scores use Wechsler's deviation IQ with mean 100 and standard deviation 15. Applying the ratio formula to a 25-year-old is the standard invalid move.
Traps that cost marks
- Calling negative reinforcement punishment; it removes a stimulus to strengthen behaviour.
- Placing conservation in the preoperational stage instead of concrete operational.
- Mixing Kohlberg's pre-conventional level with Piaget's preoperational stage.
- Treating IQ as wholly fixed and inherited.
- Defining the ZPD as what the child can do unaided, which is the opposite of Vygotsky's meaning.