Top 5 Major Perspectives of Educational Psychology

To understand the Educational Psychology and major perspectives of educational psychology this article is very beneficial for you.

To understand the major five perspectives of educational psychology implemented in our educational system. It’s important to know first what educational psychology is?

In this article, I will inform you about “Five Major Perspectives of Educational Psychology”.

Educational psychology is one of the most popular branches of psychology, dealing with analyzing and understanding the human development of students. This field studies specific educational concepts and helps develop the best methods for educating students.

The five major perspectives of educational psychology help understand the behavioral and mental aspects of students, teachers, and other educational institutions involved in the process.

What is Educational Psychology?

Educational psychology is the study of how one learns as well as the process, techniques, and methodologies that will be positively applied to improve learning.

This branch of psychology is designed to help people learn and retain information in a process that begins at birth and ends when someone transitions into old age.

It encompasses not just the process of learning for a child throughout their initial years of early childhood to late adolescence but extends all the way to include the entire lifespan in which step into educational institutions for formal training either for professional or academic reasons.

Educational psychology involves the analysis and measurement of how students take in and retain new information.

It not only deals with teaching methods but educational strategies and techniques as well are involved in this field of psychology.

The knowledge learned from educational psychology concerns individual differences in learning and also factors that go into learning throughout a person’s lifetime!

Five Major Perspectives of Educational Psychology

Every teacher has their own way of teaching. They have their own methods on how to reach every single student in their class.

But there is one thing that concerns them the most and that is each student’s capability to grasp concepts of a lesson and fully understand it.

We need to understand different viewpoints when considering this field of study.

Researchers within educational psychology tend to have different perspectives, and each of these perspectives focuses on different influences that pertain to learning and studying.

1. The Developmental Perspective

To provide students with more learning opportunities, educators must understand how young children view the world at different ages.

Educational psychologists consider developmental issues like a child’s ability to express what they think and feel as well as their relationship with adults during various stages of childhood.

Educational psychologists can better understand what children are capable of at each point along the way.

Educators can then create educational curriculums that tap into this information to help them build knowledge and skills best suited for certain age groups.

Children at different stages of development need different types of instruction.

Educational psychologists look at what each stage is capable of, then they create materials and methods to address each specific learning style.

Children at different ages have different needs to be met as they grow and develop so it’s important to have professionals on hand who are experts when it comes to child psychology in the education and learning sector.

2. The Cognitive Perspective

Based on research and evidence, there are different approaches to learning and education.

The cognitive approach to learning has become far more widespread in the last few decades because it accounts for how things such as memories, beliefs, emotions, motivations, and experiences all play a role in the way people learn.

This is called the cognitive approach to learning. It supports the idea that students learn what they want to learn and that motivation is one of the main elements of their success.

According to the Principles of educational psychology, cognitive psychology aims to understand how people think, learn, remember, and process information. The basic premise is that people use their experience as they can perceive their surroundings.

3. The Behavioral Perspective

This theory proposes that all human behavior is based on conditioning. Psychologists who adhere to this perspective often focus on the principles of operant conditioning to explain learning.

This perspective suggests that all behaviors are learned through conditioning, you build up associations between certain circumstances, or stimuli, and your own behavior.

Psychologists who take this perspective rely firmly on the principles of operant conditioning to understand how a person “becomes” a certain way, and find out why they behave like they do.

According to the behavioral perspective, everything we do is learned through experiences at some point in our lives.

Psychologists take this view because it seems that people make good choices when there are a lot of good consequences and bad choices with negative consequences.

For example, teachers reward students with shiny coins or fun items like stickers or toys if they are learning at the right level.

The behaviorist perspective emphasizes that this will teach children not to play during class because they have positive things to eat and use!

4. The Constructivist Approach

The constructivism Approach is a learning theory that emphasizes how knowledge is created based on individual experiences, interpretations, and meaning.

This theory also looks at human interactions throughout the learning process and collective knowledge-building activities by examining how information is transferred from person to person.

A constructivist approach to education believes that students learn best when they are actively involved and when their thoughts, feelings, and actions are acknowledged as contributing to their learning process.

Constructivism is quite a commonly used learning theory. It highlights the fact that we actively construct our own knowledge of the world through our experiences, feelings, thoughts, and beliefs.

Constructivism also explains that new information can only be added to existing pre-existing knowledge.

At a more basic level, the theory is based on how the human mind works – we are naturally inquisitive and want to collect as much information about our surroundings as possible!

5. Experiential Perspective

The experiential Perspective is similar to constructivist and cognitive perspectives because it takes into account the learner’s experiences, thoughts, and feelings about what is being taught.

One way to teach someone something is to make them experience it themselves. This is commonly referred to as experiential learning, and it’s important when trying to get someone to understand a concept that may not initially seem relevant or important.

Experiential learning helps people relate new concepts they’re just beginning to learn by invoking memories of things they already know, which makes the information easier for them to understand and more meaningful in their lives.

This perspective recognizes that each individual has different and unique experiences, knowledge, and interest in certain topics.

Therefore, when trying to generate awareness and understanding about a new topic it is important to provide the learner with information from multiple sources within their own context of experience.

Using this perspective, these varying experiences affect how people understand new information.

Conclusion

We hope you enjoyed and learned a lot from our article on Educational Psychology and Five Major Perspectives of Educational Psychology.

Educational Psychology is a broad term used to describe any or all of the following: how people learn, how the brain learns, and how people are impacted by their environment.

There are five major perspectives in Educational Psychology which are discussed here above. I hope you have gone through it.

We always enjoy hearing from our readers and getting your feedback! Thank you for reading, we hope that you learned a few things from our article!