An Introduction to Educational Psychology

Edgar Stones

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136661983
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein

This book introduces students of education to the elements of educational psychology. It also relates as closely as possible the findings of research to classroom practice. In order to make clear the fundamental processes involved in psychological development, the book starts with a study of the way in which the young child adapts its behaviour to its environment. This study considers some of the key aspects of physical development, mainly the central nervous system. At the same time the way physical growth and psychological development are influenced by the experience of the individual is also discussed. This discussion of development is followed by an examination of the processes of learning, with particular attention paid to the works of Piaget.

The salient points of each chapter are brought together in a summary which may be used by the reader to obtain a preliminary overview of the content of the chapter, and as an aid to revision.

Chapter 1

The Foundations of Learning

Viki was a chimpanzee reared in the household of two American psychologists, C. and K. Hayes. They adopted her a few days after birth and reared her as far as was possible as they would have reared a human child. If Viki’s development seemed to be deficient in any way as compared with human development, she was given special training. As a result of this unusual environment the chimpanzee developed more affinity with human babies than with other chimpanzees. She became capable of activity quite beyond the capacity of similar animals reared in more orthodox environments. She learned to dust, to wash dishes, to sharpen pencils, to paint furniture, and she could cope with psychological tests intended for children of her age so long as language was not involved. In many respects Viki made the same progress as a child of the same age; the most important difference was in language development where Viki made very little progress. The reason for this is probably that the brain of the chimpanzee is deficient in those areas which in humans we call the speech centres.

Viki was reared in an environment which for a chimp was extremely stimulating. She was continually being faced with problems to solve and she was given assistance where she had difficulty. In contrast chimpanzees in zoos have comparatively unstimulating environments and consequently develop much more limited abilities. The reverse is the usual case with children. The home itself generally provides a rich environment and the exceptional case is the child who is reared in an environment comparable to that of the chimpanzee reared in the zoo. The few existing reports which deal with such cases indicate that when the environment is grossly deficient in stimulation, the development of the child is correspondingly retarded.

One such report was made by R. A. Spitz in 1945 on the physical and psychological development of a number of children reared in a foundling home [1]. Their ages ranged from two to four years. Of twenty-one children five were totally unable to walk and only five could walk unassisted. Twelve could not feed themselves with a spoon, and only one could dress himself; none of the children was toilet trained. Six were unable to talk and only one could use sentences. Most of the children had the physical appearance of children about half their age. It should be stressed here that the children in the home were in no way maltreated. They had had excellent medical care, adequate diet, and had not been exposed to any injury or infection. The only abnormal thing in their life histories was the lack of social stimulation in the first years of life.

An extreme case of lack of social stimulation gave rise to one of the earliest attempts to apply scientific principles to the analysis, prediction, and modification of behaviour in man. Late in the eighteenth century a ‘wild boy’ of twelve was captured in a French forest. He was naked, walked on all fours, made unintelligible sounds, ate like an animal, and bit those who attempted to handle him. He was given to a French physician, J. M. G. Itard, to attempt to educate him. Itard thought that the child’s gross deficiency was probably caused by his prolonged isolation from society. He analysed the boy’s learning disabilities by a series of experiments and attempted to remedy them by a systematic programme of teaching. He was only moderately successful, one of the difficulties being that the boy probably suffered from some form of brain damage. But he did make some important progress, and his work foreshadows much modern work in education and psychology.

These investigations and experiments raise questions of fundamental importance for the teacher and the student of education. The key question is probably to what extent can children be trained, and to what extent are physical factors which we are unable to control likely to frustrate our efforts? The Hayeses produced behaviour in a chimpanzee quite out of proportion to the normal development of such animals. They failed to train Viki to use language probably because her brain was inadequate. On the one hand a richer environment produced much more complex behaviour, on the other hand physical deficiencies prevented the development of language despite the best efforts of the psychologists.

With children similar problems arise. We might ask if young babies a few months old can be toilet trained, or if it is possible to teach the average child of four to read. The answer to the first question is clear. The child of three to six months lacks the physiological equipment to control his bladder movements, and no amount of sitting on his pot will train him to use it at the appropriate time. At best, his mother might find out the most likely moment and time her potting with the baby’s evacuation. The answer to the question of teaching reading is less clear. Until quite recently many authorities would have stated that learning to read was dependent upon the child’s reaching a certain stage of development, normally at about the age of six. They would say that to try to teach reading before the child was ready would be harmful. While it is clear that it would be impossible to teach a young baby without speech to read, it is by no means so clear that children much younger than six cannot be taught to read. It is more than likely that the waiting for the children to reach the stage of readiness for reading is the main factor in ensuring that they do not learn to read before six. In this case it is not so much inadequate physiological equipment as lack of stimulation and training.

What is it, we might ask, that underlies this difference between the two examples of child training we have just mentioned? To help us to find the answer to this question let us consider those aspects of our bodily make-up that affect profoundly the way in which we learn or don’t learn.

Man in His Environment

When an organism learns it adapts its behaviour to cope with changes in its environment. Man is an organism; more specifically he is an animal. He is undoubtedly a remarkable, and in many ways a unique, animal. Nevertheless he resembles other animals in bodily structure and functions. Because of this resemblance we can, by studying the ways in which other animals learn, gain insight into the way man himself learns. Although it is not possible to apply automatically the lessons we learn from the study of animal behaviour to human beings, there is no mysterious qualitative difference between man and the other animals which makes his behaviour inaccessible to our understanding. Many phenomena of human behaviour are still not understood, but this is probably because of inadequate knowledge rather than because the phenomena are forever inexplicable.

From the beginning of life until death, organisms are in a continuous state of interaction with their environments. In fact the term environment is used by some psychologists to designate the aspects of the organism’s surroundings to which it is responding at a given time. This means that in the case of man he will be responding to such aspects of his surroundings as the things he can hear, see, touch, smell, taste, and feel. Such sensations may impinge upon him from his surroundings or from his internal environment, that is, from within his body.

The complexity of an organism’s adaptation to its environment depends largely on the complexity of its nervous system. Thus a simple organism such as a worm with a very simple nervous system has a very low level of adaptation to its environment: that is, it is capable of only a very limited range of activities to cope with changes in its environment. Man, on the other hand, has a very complex nervous system and is therefore capable of a much greater range of activity.

The most complex nervous system would be of little use, however, if it were isolated from its environment. The nervous system of the worm receives information about the state of the soil through the worm’s skin. When the soil dries, the worm burrows deeper to where the soil is damper. Man receives information about the environment through the various senses and because the channels through which he receives this information – the eyes, the ears, the nose and mouth, the skin, and the muscles – are so much more delicate and complex than the channels through which the worm receives its information, man is able to make much more delicate and complicated differentiation of the incoming information than the lower animal can do. Man has a further advantage over the worm. Not only can he take in more information and more complex information than the worm, he has the ability to deal with his environment in a more complicated way through the organs which act on the environment. The worm can act on its environment only in a limited way. It can take food and soil in through the mouth. It can excrete. It can wriggle around. Man, on the other hand, is capable of extremely delicate and versatile acts of manipulation because of the highly developed muscles and bone structure of his hands and fingers.

Ultimately, the adaptation of both man and worm will depend on the integrated activity of the organs which receive information from the environment, called the receptors. The nervous system that receives this information through nerve fibres, analyses it and passes it on to the effectors, i.e. the organs which act on the environment. In man all these organs are infinitely more complex than those of the worm hence the greater complexity of his adaptation to the environment.

If we compare man, not with a worm, but with a chimpanzee, we see that the differences are much less marked and yet man’s activities are still infinitely more complex than those of the chimpanzee. What is the reason for this? Is it because one or more of man’s organs are more highly developed than those of the chimpanzee? We shall discuss this at much greater length later when we shall see that physiological development is not the only thing that makes this enormous difference between the two species; however, on the physiological level there is a difference. This difference is in the level of development of the nervous system. In particular, it is the development of man’s brain that provides the physiological basis for the development of the highly complex patterns of activity of which he is capable.

In very simple animals the nervous system consists of just a few nerve fibres. With a little increase in complexity the fibres increase in number and interconnect in a neural net. The higher up the evolutionary ladder we go the more complex this neural net until in man we find a complexity of interconnections beyond the scope of our imaginations. Judson Herrick, the neurologist, at Chicago University, has calculated that if a million of the nerve cells in the human brain were joined two by two in every possible way the number of combinations would total 10^2,783,000. If this figure were written out it would take up the whole of this book. Even that would be only a fraction of the possible combinations, since every nerve cell can be linked with many more than one other, and also there are in the region of 10,000 million nerve cells in the human brain. It is this unimaginable complexity that makes for the complexity of man’s behaviour.

The Cortex

The cortex is the name we give to the part of the brain that accounts most for the tremendous complexity of the organ in man. Other parts of the brain are much more similar in man and the other animals. In man the cortex completely overshadows the rest of the brain and is the key factor in determining that man’s behaviour is of a completely different order from that of other animals. The cortex is so important, not because of any difference in the kind of nerve cells which constitute it, but because of their enormous number and the richness of their interconnections.

Although most of the cortical cells are similar, various areas of the cortex have developed specialized functions. Some areas of the cortex are concerned with vision, with motor activity, with auditory stimulation, with speech, and so on. The detailed maps of the cortex sometimes given, which link with precision, areas of the brain with different bodily functions, probably give a misleading air of accuracy. It is not possible to define these areas with such precision. However, it has been discovered that when different areas of the cortex are stimulated electrically, experiences and activity specific to different bodily functions are evoked. The control by the brain of our behaviour is demonstrated vividly in these experiments as is also its role as the seat of memory.

W. Penfield, the distinguished neurosurgeon, stimulated different parts of the cortex of patients undergoing brain operations. The patients in these operations are quite conscious since the brain has no sensation and there is therefore no pain. He found that when areas of the cortex concerned with motor activity were stimulated by slight electrical discharges, movement of the limbs was caused. The patient could do nothing to stop the movement although he realized that he had not willed to do it. Stimulation of the area concerned with hearing cause the patient to experience sounds, and stimulation of the visual area evoke sensations of brightness, colour, and so on.*

Stimulation in other cortical areas produces vivid recollections of past events. Patients have heard music as it was originally played or sung. They will say to the surgeon that there is a man at the piano, or that the people are singing in church. In one case a patient who had been stimulated repeatedly in the same place heard the same song on each occasion and refused to believe, even in discussion later, that there was no radio in the room. All these experiments illustrate graphically how our knowledge of the world, the control of our behaviour, and the mechanisms of memory are seated in the nervous activity of the brain. One other experiment which Penfield carried out leads us to another important aspect of brain function which holds great promise for future investigations of the nature of brain mechanisms.

In one experiment Penfield placed electrodes on the exposed cortex of a man undergoing an operation. The man was asked to ‘make a fist’. As he did so the pattern of electrical discharges from the brain, which was being picked up by the electrodes, changed. From the rhythm of the brain at rest the rhythm changed to that of the active brain. This illustrated the fact that motor activity is associated with changes in the pattern of electrical discharges of the cortex; this is one aspect of the discipline of electroencephalography; the study of the patterns of electrical discharges of the brain.

The Electrical Activity of the Brain

The electroencephalograph is an apparatus which uses electrodes fixed to the scalp to pick up electrical discharges from the brain. The brain does not need to be exposed as in the case of Penfield’s experiments, and there is no pain in the attaching of the electrodes to the scalp. The discharges are picked up by the electrodes and are recorded by pens on moving paper, the frequency and amplitude of the discharges being conventionally recorded as a series of wavy lines on the paper; this is the electroencephalogram or EEG. Over twenty pens record the impulses from different parts of the brain in the typical EEG. The interesting thing about EEG patterns for the psychologist is that there is evidence that they are connected with patterns of behaviour. Eventually EEG patterns may be one of the factors which link psychological phenomena with the actual activity of the brain.

EEG records show that the electrical activity of the brain conforms to certain patterns or rhythms. When the subject is at rest with the eyes closed the brain produces a slow pulsing rhythm of about ten cycles a second. This is the alpha rhythm which represents a synchronization of the activity of many cortical nerve cells or neurones. When the eyes are open the alpha rhythm disappears and is replaced by quicker, less regular discharges. In sleep the alpha rhythms are replaced by the delta rhythm which is a slower rhythm (0·5–3·5 cycles per sec.). The British scientist, W. Grey Walter, has suggested that the alpha rhythm is a form of scanning. The brain at rest, with few sensory inputs from the environment, seems to be searching for a pattern by scanning as you might search for a particular word by scanning the page of a book. When the pattern is found, the scanning ceases, as your eye movements would cease when you saw the word. The cessation of the alpha rhythm indicates the desynchronization of the electrical activity of the cortical neurones. These will now be receiving stimulation from the various receptors. They will have ‘found their pattern’ and the nerve impulses will now be engaged in dealing with the information from the environment and not with searching for it [2].

In the young baby the brain rhythms are predominantly the delta rhythms. This suggests that the child is essentially in a passive relationship with its environment. The delta rhythms are those of the sleeping adult, and although the baby is being subjected to a great number of stimuli from his environment, he lacks the cortical development t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• What This Book is About
• 1. The Foundations of Learning
• 2. The Nature of Development
• 3. An Introduction to Learning
• 4. Mechanisms of Learning
• 5. Learning and Language
• 6. Learning and Concept Formation
• 7. Language and Thought
• 8. Learning in School
• 9. Programmed Instruction
• 10. Examinations and Tests
• 11. Intelligence and Intelligence Testing
• 12. Backward Children
• 13. The Treatment of Backwardness
• 14. The Social Psychology of the School
• 15. The Teacher's Task
• Appendix How to calculate standard scores
• References
• Index