Educational Psychology
The term describes the scientific study of psychology in education
What is educational psychology?
This Swiss psychologist revolutionized education by mapping out how children actively construct knowledge across four distinct stages, from sensorimotor to formal operations.
Who is Jean Piaget?
An educator using this teaching style acts as an active inquirer, constantly analyzing, evaluating, and adjusting their methods based on classroom outcomes.
What is Reflective Teaching?
This sensory-stage milestone is vital because it means a child understands that hidden objects continue to exist even when out of sight.
What is object permanence?
This learning process occurs when a neutral environmental stimulus becomes paired with an unconditioned stimulus to automatically trigger an involuntary, reflexive response.
What is classical conditioning?
A relatively permanent change in knowledge, skill, or behavior as a result of experience
What is learning?
This Russian physiologist famously discovered the laws of classical conditioning after noticing that his laboratory dogs would reflexively salivate at the mere sound of a technician's footsteps.
Who is Ivan Pavlov?
This 2-word phrase describes the jarring confrontation that novice teachers experience when their idealistic expectations about the classroom collide with the chaotic, daily realities of real-world school environments.
What is Reality Shock?
As used by Piaget, this specific term refers to mental frameworks or structured categories that help individuals organize and interpret incoming information.
What is a schema?
This type of learning associates voluntary actions with their subsequent consequences, determining whether those behaviors will be repeated or extinguished.
What is operant conditioning?
This specific research method is used by active classroom teachers to systematically study their own local problems, test immediate interventions, and collect data to improve their personal teaching practice right away.
What is Action Research?
This radical behaviorist dropped the classical model to invent an operant chamber, proving that voluntary behavior is dictated entirely by positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, and punishment.
Who is B.F. Skinner?
A statement of desired student outcomes for following instructions
What is an Instructional Goal?
In correct chronological order, these are the four distinct developmental periods proposed by Jean Piaget.
What are the Sensorimotor, Preoperational, Concrete Operational, and Formal Operational stages?
n classical conditioning, this is the term for the biological, unlearned reaction—such as flinching at a loud noise or salivating at food—that happens completely naturally.
What is an unconditioned response (UR)?
In educational psychology, this formal concept is defined as an integrated, systematically organized set of principles used to fully explain a phenomenon, predict future classroom behaviors, and guide instructional design.
What is a Theory?
Opposing solo discovery models, this Soviet psychologist argued that culture, language, and social interaction drive cognition within a learner's Zone of Proximal Development.
Who is Lev Vygotsky?
To accurately measure this psychological metric—an educator's internal belief in their own capability to successfully organize and execute tasks to help even difficult students learn—administrators look at student growth data and self-efficacy surveys.
What is Teaching Efficacy?
High school biology teacher Luis can expect that his teenage students are just becoming capable of operating at this final Piagetian stage of abstract logic.
What is the Formal Operational stage?
If no one is tardy all week, a teacher promises to completely cancel the following week's pop quiz—a scenario that utilizes this specific behavioral consequence to increase on-time arrivals.
What is negative reinforcement? (Note: Removing an unpleasant stimulus to increase a desired behavior).
What does the acronym RIDE stand for?
What is
Reflection
Information Gathering
Decision Making
Evaluation
This theorist expanded developmental psychology across the entire human lifespan, framing personality growth around the successful resolution of eight chronological psychosocial crises.
Who is Erik Erikson?
This specific type of professional knowledge represents the seamless intersection of knowing what subject matter you are teaching and knowing how to uniquely adapt it so that specific students can understand it.
What is Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK)?
When preschooler Tyrone sees a polar bear for the first time and correctly screams "Bear!" based on his book about grizzlies, he is demonstrating this schema-fitting process.
What is assimilation?
A teacher taking away a student's recess time or free-play privileges as a direct consequence of talking out of turn is an example of this behavior-reducing technique.
What is negative punishment? (or Response Cost).