DOI:10.6129/CJP.201912_61(4).0008
Chinese Journal of Psychology 2019, Vol.61, No.4, 417-438

Learning and Instruction are the Backbone of Educational Psychology

Hwa-Wei Ko（Department of Education and Learning Technology, National Tsing Hua University）

Abstract

Educational psychology involves the study of how people learn and the instructional process in order to know more about how to help people learn best. There is a tradition for education to lean on learning theories from psychology, for early psychological studies such as memory and practice caught the eyes of educators. Nevertheless, psychology theory focused more on individual learning process and was domain general. It is almost impossible to satisfy the complex educational system where individual difference and diversity is the norm. In this thesis, the author went back to the mid-1960 when cognitive psychologists explored the processes of learning different content domains and social construction was introduced to form instructional designs. Then the emergence of educational technology and cooperative, collaborative learning prevailed in the research. It seems that educational psychology has established its discipline. However, after examining the educational psychology textbooks, the fact is that most of them do not catch up with the trend, neither the cognitive process of domain content learning nor the collaborative learning. It is argued that the content of textbooks should be revised and even altered to meet the trend in order to make a way for future teacher’s professional development of learning and instruction.

Keywords: domain relevant, educational psychology, social construction