Teaching, Learning and Psychology

Jane Yeomans, Christopher Arnold

• Publisher: David Fulton Publishers
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135056339
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Presenting a range of psychological theories in a non-technical and readable style, this book shows how psychology can be used to effectively deliver educational objectives and enhance children's learning. Linking theory with practical application, the authors consider the wider role that schools can play in the social development of children through:

• teaching and managing individual pupils
• teaching and managing groups of pupils
• the teacher as part of an organisation and school system
• the teacher as part of the community of the school and area.

Structured to reflect the standards for QTS and relevant for key stages 1-4, this book shows how understanding the psychological theories underpinning pedagogy can help both trainee and practising teachers become reflective and informed practitioners when faced with new and challenging teaching situations.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction to theories

Introduction and chapter aims

The histories of universal education and psychology are remarkably intertwined. The 1870 Education Act made education compulsory for all. The first university department of psychology in the world was founded in Leipzig in 1879 by Wilhelm Wundt. In England the first department was in Cambridge. Although it was suggested in 1877, the first proposal was rejected on the grounds that it would ‘insult religion by putting the soul in a pair of scales’. It was properly established in the first years of the twentieth century. Since then, education has developed and incorporated insights and techniques researched by psychologists. Knowledge of the foundations of psychology is particularly useful in education. If a car goes wrong and needs mending, you can either be shown how to fix the particular problem or develop an understanding of how the car works. The latter will equip you to analyse and diagnose a wide variety of problems, the former will only help with that single situation. Similarly, understanding how people learn will help teachers face a range of situations. Psychology offers such an understanding by providing:

•ways of thinking about and understanding children;

•ways of getting information about children's learning; and

•a vast, world-wide source of information about different people in different circumstances, but collected in a systematic way.

This chapter aims:

•to introduce different psychological theories currently used in education;

•to outline the ranges of convenience of the theories; and

•to illustrate how the different theories illuminate different elements of the same situation.

Psychology or psychologies?

Psychology has developed in different directions and there are now distinct schools of psychology. Each school has developed different ways of analysing situations and different kinds of explanation. The extent to which a school or theory is applicable is called its range of convenience. Each school has a different range of convenience and makes different assumptions about people. Therefore, different schools can draw different conclusions about the same situations. Before embarking on applications of psychology to education, we must understand some of these different schools. This book outlines the following schools:

•biological

•behavioural

•experiential

•social constructionist

•cognitive

•psycho-dynamic.

As we shall see, they all have utility in education.

There are other schools such as :

•Marxist

•feminist

•critical

•post-modern

•emancipatory.

Their omission is simply due to limited space, although there are many valuable insights from these schools of thought, too.

Biological psychology

We are biological beings. We all have bodies with chemical and electrical reactions occurring within them. The biological school looks at the workings of our bodies within the social contexts in which they are found. Behaviour, thoughts and feelings are understood in the context of our physical make-up. Developmental psychology is an example of biological psychology and studies the ways in which we change as we grow. It looks for universals in development in children's lives.

Consider the following sequence:

1grasping

2holding

3making marks on a surface

4scribbling

5copying

6writing.

This represents the stages leading up to writing and illustrates a developmental sequence. Such sequences of stages have the following characteristics:

•Each stage has a particular focus or repertoire of behaviours.

•The behaviours at each stage are different from those in other stages.

•Children go through each stage in the same order.

Stage theories of development have been criticised as lacking evidence. However, recent developments in mathematics have revived interest. It is now possible to produce simple mathematical models that account for the ways in which one stage of stability arises from another. Piaget's stage theory is considered in Chapter 2.

Links between psychology and biology

Evidence of the relationship between psychology and biology can be found in research on heart attacks and personality types. Friedman and Rosenman (1974) analysed behavioural habits and the likelihood of suffering from heart disease. They concluded that there were two different approaches to stressful situations and that one was more likely to lead to heart attacks than the other. Type A characteristics involved individuals becoming impatient and angry when confronted by stressful situations; type Β individuals tended to be able to relax and not become agitated. Type A behaviours include:

•having difficulty sitting still;

•needing to win competitive games;

•thinking of doing more than one thing at a time;

•becoming anxious when needing to wait for something;

•needing to be on time; and

•getting impatient with others, believing that they can do the task faster.

Type Β behaviours include:

•being able to sit and relax;

•stopping to appreciate a good view;

•remaining calm in frustrating circumstances;

• being patient with others; and

•lacking a sense of urgency.

There are many other features. Fortunately, it has proved possible to teach type A individuals to respond more like type Β with a positive impact on health.

Biological ideas can extend further into behaviour. Charles Darwin described the process of natural selection and the survival of the fittest organism leading to the evolution of the species. Richard Dawkins has refined those ideas to consider genes mutating, with those that offer survival advantages being selected. The fittest genes are passed on. If genes influence behaviour then some behaviours, too, might be passed on from one generation to another. We can consider the ‘survival of the fittest behaviours’. This is called sociobiology.

A controversial illustration of this can be found in the work of Buss et al. (1992). They investigated sexual jealousy in men and women by asking subjects to imagine their partners either having sexual intercourse or establishing a relationship with someone else. Physiological reactions were measured by looking at heart rate and skin conductivity (arousal causes sweat, which changes electrical conductivity). The reactions were different. Eighty-five per cent of women showed more anxiety imagining the relationship than the intercourse, while 60 per cent of men became more anxious imagining the intercourse rather than relationship. This is consistent with the predictions made by the sociobiological theory. Men cannot be absolutely certain that children carry their genes, whereas, until very recently, women could be. It is in the woman's interest to secure a partner who will provide for them and their child, so a relationship with another is more threatening than intercourse. It is in the man's interest to ensure that the partner does not carry any other man's genes, so the intercourse is more threatening than a relationship.

Our final illustration of biological models examines individual differences in drug and alcohol addiction. The development of residential accommodation in tower blocks in the 1960s led to large numbers of young mothers being housed in areas away from their previous communities. Many found themselves powerless and lonely and became depressed. They went to their doctors who prescribed an anti-depressant drug, Valium. This led to addiction to the drug. Do we consider the addiction to be biological in origin or an adaption to an unsatisfying environment? Cox and Klinger (1988) demonstrated differences in susceptibility of rats’ brains to alcohol. It is possible to breed rats selectively to increase susceptibility to alcohol. This points to a genetic link. So is addiction to alcohol a result of a genetic difference in the brains of alcoholics? Should we consider alcoholism a disease? Cox and Klinger's model suggests that people weigh up the advantages and disadvantages before deciding to drink. Alcohol might bring about a better mental state than not drinking. Use of alcohol may be an adaption to a social situation rather than a disease.

Critical periods

Developmental psychology considers evidence for critical periods in development. This needs some explanation. If some experiences are not available at certain points, does lasting and irreversible damage occur? Evidence for this was provided by examination of 102 persistent offenders, aged between 15 and 18, by John Bowlby for the World Health Organisation in 1951. He concluded that the offenders demonstrated anxieties which dated back to unsatisfactory relationships in early childhood. The young people had been separated from or rejected by their mothers in early life. Many had been raised in children's homes. He concluded that absence of a secure bond with a caring adult caused serious and long-lasting damage. His work was used to change the ways in which young children in hospitals were treated. Nurses were encouraged to give ‘tender loving care’ to children. Although Bowlby's work was criticised for highlighting only one factor in an extremely complex field, his ideas led to a wide acceptance of the need for young children to have stable adults in their lives. An application of Bowlby's work (nurture groups) is described in Chapter 2.

The concept of critical periods has also been applied to children's academic learning, in the context of neurological bases for educational programmes. This application of the concept is discussed in Chapter 4 in the section about the role of the brain.

What constitutes an explanation?

The nature of the insights and explanations of learning generated from a biological perspective tends to fall into one of two categories:

•Causal explanations look at the biochemical processes around behaviour. The suggestion that some brains are different and more susceptible to alcohol is one example of this.

•Functional explanations look at how the behaviour (or belief or feeling) serves the organism. The work by Buss on sexual jealousy is such an example.

Within this school, learning is considered to be a process of adaption to the environment. Biological analyses are good at discovering predispositions to learning and behaviour. These may include physiological responses such as anger and love, ways in which children interact in school and addictive behaviours. They are not particularly useful in examining how we learn skills and behaviours. For this we turn to behavioural psychology.

Behavioural psychology

The professor of psychology at Harvard in the 1890s was William James (brother of the author Henry James). In his textbook of psychology he asserted that: ‘Psychology is to be treated as a natural science’. He proceeded to separate psychology from philosophy and rejected introspection in favour of observation. He made three assumptions to create this type of psychology:

•Mental events could be examined with the same discipline as a physicist treated his/her research interest.

•‘Mental facts cannot be properly studied apart from the physical environment of which they take cognizance’ (James 1905). In other words, the environment in which the learning occurs needed to be considered as a factor influencing the learning. When a person learns something, they must be able to demonstrate what has been learned in a form external to the human body. So they must be able to do something different to prove that they have learned it. It is not enough for a child to say that he/she has learned their lesson, they have to act differently next time.

•Complex behaviours are combinations of simpler ones. Behaviour can be analysed by dividing into parts.

•Principles of learning can be found in other species. We can understand our own learning by studying learning in ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• About the authors
• Preface and acknowledgements
• How to use this book
• 1 Introduction to theories
• 2 Child development
• 3 Teacher perceptions of children
• 4 Classroom learning and learning styles
• 5 The teacher and the community of the school
• 6 Managing the classroom
• 7 Communication, prejudice and equality in the classroom
• 8 Monitoring and assessment
• 9 Understanding and managing special educational needs
• 10 The reflective teacher
• References
• Index