essay on psychology of education

ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

How the psychology of education contributes to research with a social impact on the education of students with special needs: the case of successful educational actions.

• 1 Department of Theory and History of Education, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain
• 2 Department of Pedagogy, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain
• 3 Departament of Comparative Education and Education History, University of Valencia, Valencia, Spain

One current challenge in the psychology of education is identifying the teaching strategies and learning contexts that best contribute to the learning of all students, especially those whose individual characteristics make their learning process more difficult, as is the case for students with special needs. One main theory in the psychology of education is the sociocultural approach to learning, which highlights the key role of interaction in children’s learning. In the case of students with disabilities, this interactive understanding of learning is aligned with a social model of disability, which looks beyond individual students’ limitations or potentialities and focuses on contextual aspects that can enhance their learning experience and results. In recent years, the interactive view of learning based on this theory has led to the development of educational actions, such as interactive groups and dialogic literary gatherings, that have improved the learning results of diverse children, including those with disabilities. The aim of this paper is to analyze the social impact achieved by a line of research that has explored the benefits of such successful educational actions for the education of students with special needs. National and European research projects based on the communicative methodology of research have been conducted. This methodology entails drawing on egalitarian dialogue with the end-users of research – including teachers, students with and without disabilities, students’ relatives and other community members – to allow an intersubjective creation of knowledge that enables a deeper and more accurate understanding of the studied reality and its transformative potential. This line of research first allowed the identification of the benefits of interactive learning environments for students with disabilities educated in mainstream schools; later, it allowed the spreading of these actions to a greater number of mainstream schools; and more recently, it made it possible to transfer these actions to special schools and use these actions to create shared learning spaces between mainstream and special schools. The improvement of the educational opportunities for a greater number and greater diversity of students with special needs evidences the social impact of research based on key contributions of the psychology of education.

Introduction

Access to mainstream, inclusive and quality education for children with disabilities has not yet been fully achieved. Children with disabilities are still being educated in special schools in most countries, with varying percentages depending on the country, and therefore these schools attend diverse special needs ( World Health Organization, 2011 ). In addition, students with disabilities and special needs tend to leave school without adequate qualifications ( European Agency for Special Needs and Inclusive Education, 2017 ). Therefore, the appropriate inclusion of children with disabilities into the general education system is part of the European Disability Strategy 2010–2020 ( European Commission, 2010 ). In this context, one current challenge of the psychology of education is to identify the teaching strategies and learning contexts that best contribute to the education of students with special needs. In this endeavor, research in the psychology of education is focused on the strategies, actions and practices that enhance the learning of these students, taking into account their individual characteristics, however, importantly, research is also focused on the strategies, actions and programs that benefit the learning of all students, including those whose individual characteristics make the learning process more difficult, so that shared learning environments that promote successful learning for all can be created.

Instrumental learning, especially in regards to difficulties in reading and literacy, is one of the main concerns of research on the psychology of education ( Lloyd et al., 2009 ; Alanazi, 2017 ; Alenizi, 2019 ; Auphan et al., 2019 ; Hughes et al., 2018 ). Numerous programs for improving reading and/or reading difficulty prevention have emerged from research on reading and literacy from the perspective of the psychology of education, and their impact on improving children’s learning has been analyzed ( Vellutino and Scanlon, 2002 ; Papadopoulos et al., 2004 ; Hatcher et al., 2006 ). There are also specific studies about reading and literacy programs and their success with students with special needs ( Holliman and Hurry, 2013 ) and/or with students at risk for reading disabilities ( Lovett et al., 2017 ). Strategies to promote the learning of mathematics in children with special educational needs and disabilities have also been studied ( Pitchford et al., 2018 ), and programs based on these strategies have been developed ( Montague et al., 2014 ).

Research has also explored the association between learning difficulties and behavior problems ( Roberts et al., 2019 ), showing that lower academic achievement is a risk factor for developing behavior difficulties among students with special educational needs and disabilities ( Oldfield et al., 2017 ). The study of the learning context and the school environment, which facilitates or hinders learning, has shown that the expectations from teachers and their attitudes toward children with special needs are some of the most influential elements ( Anderson et al., 2014 ; Wilson et al., 2016 ; Bowles et al., 2018 ). Research has also found that teachers can have an important influence on the social acceptance of peers with special needs ( Schwab et al., 2016 ), which is important because the social exclusion of children can affect their learning difficulties and behavior problems ( Krull et al., 2018 ). The efficacy of peer network interventions for improving the social connections of students with severe disabilities has been highlighted ( Asmus et al., 2017 ), and programs and educational actions based on peer interaction, such as cooperative learning ( Velázquez Callado, 2012 ), have been developed to improve the school climate. Importantly, there are effective programs for improving peer acceptance and a positive coexistence related to curricular learning ( Law et al., 2017 ; Vuorinen et al., 2019 ), which is a key issue in facilitating inclusive education.

This body of research on effective actions and programs to enhance the learning and inclusion of students with disabilities and special needs shows the capacity that research in the psychology of education has for improving the education of these students. It also shows the importance that the learning context has, regarding both instruction and social relations, on the academic and social performance of students with special needs. This resonates with the social model of disability, an approach that has been claimed, from the perspective of human rights, to shift the focus from non-disabled centrism and to transcend the traditional and individualistic perspective of disabilities to focus on the improvement of educational experiences for these students ( Chun Sik Min, 2010 ; Park, 2015 ). This perspective assumes not only that children with disabilities should be included in mainstream education but also that inclusive education can be more effective ( Lindsay, 2007 ). This interactive understanding of learning allows seeing beyond individual students’ limitations or potentialities and focusing on contextual aspects that can enhance their learning experience and results ( Goodley, 2001 ; Haegele and Hodge, 2016 ).

The classical psychology of education already emphasized the importance of the social context for children’s learning. In particular, the sociocultural approach of learning developed by Vygotsky and Bruner highlighted the key role of interaction in children’s learning and development. Both authors agreed that what a child learns has been shared with other persons first, emphasizing the social construction of knowledge. While Vygotsky (1980) stated that in children’s development, higher psychological functions appear first on the interpsychological level and then on the intrapsychological level, Bruner (1996) refers to a social moment where there is interaction and then an individual moment when interiorization occurs.

Bruner evolved from a more cognitivist perspective of learning centered on individuals’ information processing ( Bruner, 1973 ) to a more sociocultural and interactive perspective ( Bruner, 1996 ) within the framework of which he conceptualized the idea of “scaffolding,” which enables novice learning in interaction with an expert, and “subcommunities of mutual learners,” where “learners help each other learn” and “scaffold for each other” ( Bruner, 1996 , p. 21). For Bruner, “It is principally through interacting with others that children find out what the culture is about and how it conceives of the world” (1996, p. 20); therefore, learning occurs through interaction within a community.

Vygotsky stated that learning precedes development, not the other way around, and he conceptualized the zone of proximal development (ZPD), which represents the opportunity that learning interactions with adults and more capable peers have to advance children’s development ( Vygotsky, 1980 ); beyond the actual level of development, the ZPD emphasizes the importance of interactions with others to solve problems and learn. He emphasized that this interaction is especially important for children with disabilities: “Precisely because retarded children, when left to themselves, will never achieve well elaborated forms of abstract thought, the school should make every effort to push them in that direction and to develop in them what is intrinsically lacking in their own development” ( Vygotsky, 1980 , p. 89). In this regard, he warned of the risks of working with children with disabilities from a perspective centered on biological processes and basic dysfunctions instead of working with higher psychological functions ( Vygotsky, 2018 ). Vygotsky’s focus on interaction provides new opportunities for learning and development for children with special needs to develop these higher psychological processes.

The sociocultural approach of learning developed by Vygotsky and Bruner has continued inspiring theory and research in the psychology of education to today. According to Dainez and Smolka (2014) , Vygotsky’s concept of compensation in relation to children with disabilities implies a social formation of mind and therefore the social responsibility of organizing an appropriate educational environment for these children. Vygotsky’s approach has been taken into account in studies about how peer mediation increases learning, especially when peers have different cognitive levels ( Tzuriel and Shamir, 2007 ), and research on children with disabilities, for instance, cerebral palsy, has been conducted based on Vygotsky’s contributions and showed improvements in these children’s spatial abilities, social interaction, autonomy, and participation in class activities ( Akhutina et al., 2003 ; Heidrich and Bassani, 2012 ).

In recent years, the interactive view of learning has led to the development of educational actions that have improved the learning results of diverse children, including those with disabilities. INCLUD-ED ( Flecha, 2006-2011 ) was an integrated project funded by the European Union under its 6th Framework Programme with the main objective of achieving both academic success and social cohesion for all children and communities in Europe, regardless of their socioeconomic status and/or ethnic background. INCLUD-ED identified successful educational actions (SEAs), that is, actions that can improve school success and contribute to social cohesion in every context where they are implemented ( Flecha, 2015 ). Some of the SEAs that have demonstrated improvements in reading, mathematics and peer relationships include interactive groups (IG) and dialogic literary gatherings (DLG). IG ( Valls and Kyriakides, 2013 ) consists of organizing classrooms in small heterogeneous groups that work on instrumental learning activities drawing on mutual support and dynamized by adult volunteers from the community; DLG ( Soler, 2015 ; Lopez de Aguileta, 2019 ) consists of reading and discussing classical works of literature based on the principles of dialogic learning, reaching deeper understanding of the texts as a result of sharing the participants’ interpretations and meanings. In both actions, learning interactions, as the main tool to promote learning, are facilitated among diverse persons in accordance with the contributions of the sociocultural theory of learning. In this regard, previous research has identified that Vygotsky’s and Bruner’s contributions are at the basis of these SEAs ( Elboj and Niemelä, 2010 ; Garcia et al., 2010 ).

Materials and Methods

The objective of this paper is to analyze the social impact achieved by a line of research that has explored the benefits of SEAs on the improvement of the education of students with special needs. For this purpose, the following data collection methods were used. First, existing data from case studies conducted within the four projects that compose this line of research have been analyzed to identify the impact of SEAs on students with special needs. These projects studied the benefits of SEAs for diverse students at different specific levels (i.e., school and classroom organization, community participation, interactions). In this paper, we aim to go beyond these specific aspects to understand in a more integrated and comprehensive manner how these different levels contribute to the impact that SEAs have, specifically on students with special needs. Second, new data were collected through in-depth interviews with teachers involved in the implementation of these actions in their schools as a consequence of this line of research. These interviews allowed the analysis of the subsequent impacts achieved as a result of conducting research on this topic from the perspective of the agents involved in the implementation of the results of this line of research.

All participants (teachers, volunteers, families, and children) agreed to provide researchers access to relevant data for the purpose of the study. Prior to data collection, they were informed of the nature of the research, and written informed consent was obtained. In the case of minors, informed consent was obtained from their parents or guardians. All participants were informed that their participation was anonymous and voluntary and that data would be treated confidentially and used solely for research purposes. Ethical requirements were addressed following the Ethics Review Procedure established by the European Commission (2013) for EU research, the Data Protection Directive 95/46/EC and the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (2000/C 364/01). The study was fully approved by the Ethics Board of the Community of Researchers on Excellence for All (CREA) 1 .

Case Studies

The line of research that we analyze in terms of social impact is composed of four national and European research projects in which the authors have participated in the last 15 years. In these projects, a total of 36 case studies were conducted. Of these cases, 10 included data on the participation of students with special needs in SEAs (see Table 1 ), and these were analyzed for the purposes of this paper. These cases fulfilled two criteria: (1) the schools were implementing SEAs and (2) students with special needs participated in SEAs with their classmates. Overall, 60 data collection techniques were used in the 10 case studies. These included 36 interviews, 14 with class teachers (3 of them were also special education teachers), 4 with special education teachers, 3 with volunteers, 8 with students, and 7 with students’ relatives; 13 focus groups, 5 with teachers, 8 with students, and 1 with students’ relatives; and 10 observations, 9 in classrooms and 1 in a teachers’ meeting (see more details in Table 1 ).

Table 1. Summary of the data collection instruments and participants in the project case studies.

The different projects focused on different aspects of the SEAs and therefore entailed different layers of analysis throughout this line of research, which has allowed a comprehensive view of the benefits of SEAs for diverse students and specifically for students with special needs.

The doctoral project funded by the Catalan Government ( Molina, 2003-2007 ) was the first research to specifically focus on the inclusion of students with special needs in SEAs, and particularly analyzed the type of classroom interactions that facilitate students’ inclusion when classrooms are organized in IG. The project’s main objective was to analyze the influence that students’ participation in IG has on their educational inclusion. The main categories of analysis were peer interactions and community participation as components of IG and learning , participation and social inclusion as components of educational inclusion.

INCLUD-ED ( Flecha, 2006-2011 ) aimed to identify educational actions that contributed to overcoming segregation and promoted the inclusion of all students in schools across Europe, with a special focus on vulnerable groups of students. INCLUD-ED clarified the distinction between mixture, streaming and inclusion ( INCLUD-ED Consortium, 2009 ) as different ways of organizing student diversity and human resources with different consequences on students; distinguished different forms of family and community participation; identified educative, decisive, and evaluative forms of participation as those that had more impact on students’ success; and identified successful educational actions. The contribution of this project to this line of research was an analysis of SEAs at the level of school organization, resource management and community engagement. The main objective of the case studies within this project was to analyze components from educational practices that decrease the rates of school failure and those of the practices that increase them. The main categories of analysis were inclusive practices and community participation .

MIXSTRIN ( Valls, 2008-2011 ), as a continuation of the INCLUD-ED research in the Spanish context, deepened the analysis of the different forms and consequences of mixture, streaming and inclusion from a mixed methods approach. Thus, this project focused on analyzing SEAs at the level of classroom organization. The main objective of the case studies was to identify how different ways of grouping students are related to students’ learning results. The main categories of analysis were practices of mixture, streaming , and inclusion .

Finally, INTER-ACT ( Garcia-Carrion, 2018-2020 ) analyzes how SEAs are being implemented with students with disabilities in both mainstream schools and special schools, with the aim of transferring these actions and their benefits to new schools. The project’s focus of analysis is the interactions that occur in IG and DLG in both types of schools. The main objective of the case study conducted was to analyze in depth successful cases of schools implementing IG and DLG with students with disabilities to identify the best conditions for increasing the impact on the improvement of learning, development and relationships. The main categories of analysis were characteristics of the interactive learning environment and improvements achieved.

Within the different research projects, using the case study as a methodological approach has allowed understanding the reality of the object of study in context. Following Stake (2006) , case studies were selected based on what information they could provide about the issue explored, in this case, the increase in the educational quality provided to students in SEAs, especially to those with special needs. In this regard, case studies were instrumental in providing insight into this issue. As a sum of individual research projects, the line of research presented here constitutes multicase research ( Stake, 2006 ), where cases share similarities – e.g., data collection techniques, the population object of study and purpose – and allow understanding from the singularity of each case of the broader phenomenon that all of them are part of.

In-Depth Interviews

Five interviews were conducted with teachers who fulfilled two criteria: (1) they were implementing SEAs with their students, including students with special needs, and (2) they had started to implement these actions as a consequence of the research line on SEAs and special needs, that is, after becoming aware of the evidence obtained on the benefits of SEAs for these students. Two of the interviewees were teachers at one school where one of the case studies was conducted while the other interviews were not related to the case studies. The interviews were conducted by one of the researchers at the end of the 2018–2019 school year, and at that time, the participants had been implementing SEAs for a period of 4–6 years (see Table 2 ). The interviews lasted between 20 and 55 min and were conducted at times and in places that were convenient for the participants. We introduced the interviews as follows: “In the last 15 years, a line of research has been conducted on the educational inclusion of students with special needs through SEAs. We are interested in gathering information on the social impact of this line of research.” Sample questions were as follows: “Can you identify some of those impacts (e.g., improvements in the learning of students with special needs or improvements in the schools’ approach to responding to students’ diversity)?”; “How has the line of research led/contributed to such impacts?”; “Have these impacts been transferred to different contexts or students with different characteristics?”; and “Have the impacts been sustained over time?” All interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim for subsequent analysis.

Table 2. Profiles of the participants in the in-depth interviews.

Communicative Methodology

This line of research has been conducted based on the communicative methodology ( Gómez et al., 2011 ). The data collection and analysis of the social impact achieved has also been conducted based on this methodology. The communicative methodology entails drawing on egalitarian dialogue with the end-users of the research – including teachers, students with and without disabilities, students’ relatives and other community members – to allow an intersubjective creation of knowledge that enables a deeper and more accurate understanding of the studied reality and its transformative potential ( Gómez et al., 2012 ), therefore enabling greater social impact. Different studies have demonstrated the suitability of this methodology when researching vulnerable groups ( Puigvert et al., 2012 ; Gómez et al., 2019 ), as well as the social impact that this methodology produces.

Following the communicative methodology, in this line of research, data collection techniques were aimed not only at gathering the individuals’ experiences and perceptions but also to discussing these experiences and perceptions with them in light of previous scientific knowledge on the issue and with the purpose of identifying both the exclusionary and transformative components of the reality studied. While exclusionary components refer to the barriers encountered by certain persons or collectives, for instance, educational barriers encountered by persons with disabilities, transformative components are those elements that contribute to overcoming these barriers, for instance, certain types of classroom organization or learning interactions. The objective of the dialogues held with end-users and other stakeholders in the research process is to agree upon these exclusionary and transformative components, which strengthens the validity of the research results and its potential social impact.

Data Analysis

For this paper, the different case studies have been analyzed together to understand in an integrated manner how the different layers analyzed previously (school and classroom organization, community participation, interactions) contribute to the social impact of the implementation of SEAs with students with special needs. For this purpose, the existing data of the case studies were analyzed with a new set of categories that was created to examine this social impact. Taking into account that the main challenges in the education of children with special needs are their limited participation in normalized learning environments ( World Health Organization, 2011 ), their lower educational levels achieved ( European Agency for Special Needs and Inclusive Education, 2017 ) and their higher risk of being socially marginalized and bullied ( UNESCO, 2017 ), the improvements in these domains constitute the social impact of the educational intervention aimed at students with special needs; therefore, the following were the basis for creating the categories for the analysis of the social impact of SEAs:

(1) Impact on students’ participation: characteristics of the successful educational actions that enable the participation of students with special needs.

(2) Impact on the cognitive dimension: improvements achieved in instrumental learning and cognitive development.

(3) Impact on the socioemotional dimension: improvements achieved in social cohesion and emotional/affective development.

The newly conducted interviews on the social impact of the line of research were analyzed with categories that take into account the social impact criteria identified by IMPACT-EV (European Commission FP7, 2014-2017) and used in SIOR ( Flecha et al., 2015 ) regarding improvements, sustainability and transference. The fourth category emerged inductively from the data:

(1) Impact on students with special needs: improvements and sustainability,

(2) Impact on schools: improvements and sustainability,

(3) Transference to new contexts, and

(4) Factors supporting social impact.

The themes present in the transcripts were coded by the researchers on a line-by-line basis. A deductive, flexible approach was used for the coding to identify subthemes within the categories. Categories of analysis were applied to the transcripts by two independent coders to enhance the validity of the results. Consensus for the coding was achieved through discussion.

In the following, the social impact of the line of research is presented, which includes evidence on the benefits of SEAs for students with special needs and how such SEAs led to a new social impact on different schools, students, teachers and contexts. Three types of social impact are presented: (1) impact on students with special needs and their opportunities to participate, learn and have positive relationships in SEAs; (2) impact on schools’ and teachers’ approaches to meeting students’ special needs; and (3) the replicability of SEAs to new types of educational contexts and student populations. The factors that have enabled the achievement of these impacts are also reported.

Social Impact 1: Enhanced Participation, Learning Opportunities, and Group Cohesion for Students With Special Needs in Successful Educational Actions

The social impact of seas.

Previous analyses of the case studies showed that SEAs entail a more efficient organization of classrooms and schools, allowing a more inclusive education for a diverse student body, including students with special needs, who can benefit from enhanced access to the content of the general curriculum in a shared learning environment ( Christou and Molina, 2009 ; Molina and Ríos, 2010 ). A key feature of the inclusive learning environments promoted in the SEAs is the diverse interactions promoted around learning among, on the one hand, students, as they are organized in heterogeneous groups and, on the other hand, relatives and other members of the community, who are welcome to participate in the students’ learning activities. These interactions are key components of the SEAs that have created new learning opportunities for students with special needs in mainstream schools and, more recently, in special schools ( García-Carrión et al., 2016 , 2018 ).

The analysis of the social impact of SEAs on students with special needs shows positive impacts in terms of the participation, learning and social inclusion of these students. Regarding student participation, the supportive peer interactions promoted within the SEAs and the participation of volunteers from the community, who ensured that these supportive interactions were implemented and provided assistance themselves when necessary, facilitated normalized and active participation in learning activities and natural support within the student group, which progressively made specific, individualized support less necessary ( Molina, 2003-2007 ). For this to occur, the case studies showed the importance of the activities that students worked on in the IG being the same for all of them and of students with special needs not being given different activities in any case. The same occurred with DLG: all students participating in the gathering read the same book. The analysis showed that this was important because both IG and DLG work based on interactions and, if one student was given an activity or a book that was different than that of the other students, interaction of this student with the group would be easily broken. In some cases, adaptations were made regarding the way students accessed the material, interacted with it or produced an output or regarding the level of complexity required. However, the learning content was always the same to allow the maximum benefit from interaction and the highest possible level of attainment. Across the case studies, teachers reported that supportive interactions within heterogeneous groups in successful educational actions had been more effective than differentiated individual attention separated from the class, even in the cases when additional human resources were used. Therefore, SEAs have prevented reducing learning opportunities related to the segregation and individualization of educational measures often aimed at these students ( Valls, 2008-2011 ; Flecha, 2015 ).

In terms of learning and cognitive development, the possibility of asking questions when necessary and constantly seeing and listening to peers working on the activity and talking about it helped students with special needs stay connected to the activity, understand it and do it ( Molina, 2003-2007 ; Valls, 2008-2011 ). Learning progress was more evident in instrumental learning subjects (literacy, math), which are prioritized in IG and DLG. Specifically, due to the interactive and dialogical nature of both IG and DLG, communicative ability is one learning and development area in which students show a clear improvement. In this regard, for these children, DLG have meant the opportunity to broaden their vocabulary and gain a better understanding of the language structure, as they are able to listen more proficient children and adults, who also model language and help the students with special needs express themselves better ( Garcia-Carrion, 2018-2020 ).

Regarding the social impact of SEAs on the social inclusion of students with special needs and group cohesion, it was observed that the participation of these students in regular class activities that IG and DLG facilitated contributed to considering these students as “one of the class” and not a “part-time student” who only shares part of their time and activities with their classmates. Beyond participation, SEAs gave students opportunities to interact with their peers and therefore to come to know better each other, ultimately building new friendships. Peer support and friendship that were learned in IG and DLG often extended beyond the class and beyond the context of school, creating new opportunities for both cognitive and social development, for instance, when students with special needs had the opportunity to share their doubts with their classmates when doing homework via telephone or social networks or to meet them at birthday parties ( Valls, 2008-2011 ; Garcia-Carrion, 2018-2020 ).

Extending Improvements to More Schools and Students

The case studies showed ways in which the education of students with special needs improved in SEAs, as well as key components of these actions that explained the results. Both findings were crucial to extend these actions and their benefits to more children with special needs and thus for the social impact of the research.

The first time that primary schools were transformed into learning communities and implemented SEAs was in 1995 in Spain. There were five schools at that time. Ten years later, in 2005, there were 22 schools. After 10 more years, in 2015, the number reached 120 schools in different countries ( Flecha, 2015 ). Today, 225 schools in Spain 2 , 49 schools in other European countries 3 , and 411 schools in Latin America 4 , each with diverse populations, have become learning communities through the application of successful educational actions. These data show that the INCLUD-ED project (2006–2011) was a turning point in the spread of SEAs in schools. The spread of the project also meant that these actions could reach more diverse students with special needs. The applicability of the SEAs with these students was usually a topic of debate among the teachers that incorporated these actions in their schools. When the knowledge of the evidence provided by the line of research reached the new schools, both teachers and the rest of community became more confident when including students with disabilities in IG, DLG, and other shared learning activities in the school. The different teachers interviewed explained that the implementation of SEAs in their schools has increased over time and so has the participation of students with special needs, which reaches 100% in some cases. As one teacher explained, the participation in SEAs prevents the need for individual support outside the classroom: “Out of all the classes, there is not any child that gets out of the classroom [to receive individual support] when they work on SEAs” (Sandra). The implementation of SEAs with students with special needs – as well as with the general population of students – has not only been sustained but has increased, as, for teachers, it is an efficient way to respond to these – and other – students’ needs:

In the school, almost all students with special needs participate in SEAs (.) From my experience I can tell you that I used to do an SEA session per week, then I did two, this year I have done three, and now I cannot imagine less than three, every time I need to do it more and more. (Carmen)

The benefits observed by research in the case studies then started to spread to more children in other schools. Two examples can illustrate these improvements. First, the case of a child with a severe neurological deficit, for whom participating in SEAs made it possible to transform the expectations that were imposed on his learning possibilities:

The neurologist said that he could not learn almost anything. literacy and all the learning, they saw it as impossible. but he has learnt to read (…) if we hadn’t known about it, that evidence about interactions… Last year we did 6 sessions [of IG] per week, plus DLG, we did as much as we could, and it is amazing what he has learnt. (Sandra)

Research has already shown that being able to participate and learn in IG and DLG changes the self-concept and learning expectations of the children with special needs as well as the concept and expectations their peers and adults have of them. In these interactive learning environments, students were often able to solve tasks that they could not solve alone or read books that could not read alone, going beyond teachers’ and families’ expectations for their learning ( Flecha, 2015 ). When SEAs reached new schools and students, these higher expectations, which create new learning opportunities, were created there too.

The second example is of a child with Down syndrome who could benefit from a more normalized learning environment where he could make progress in both learning and group belonging; this shows how the benefits that research had identified in group cohesion were replicated in other cases like this:

We had another child with a disability who was very isolated from the group, he did not have an emotional bond either, and the attention he received was too individualized; with the special education teacher, the speech therapist, he did not feel he belonged to the group. And when we started implementing SEAs, work in IG, DLG, the group changed very much, (…) and the child, who had Down syndrome, started to belong to the group: worked on the same activities as the others, and the others counted on that child. It was a huge change. (…) We achieved a lot of things. (Carmen)

Both teachers, Sandra and Carmen, clearly attributed the improvements observed to the students’ participation in IG and DLG. In some cases, looking for the participation of these children in SEAs has made teachers look for adaptations that enabled their participation. This was the case for a child in Irene’s school. He had not developed oral language, which made it difficult to participate in DLG, but the teachers adapted the book to pictograms and facilitated him in using a tablet with the pictograms and synthesized voice software installed so that he could communicate in the group. This had several impacts: first, the child could follow the reading, think of an idea to share and structure the idea; second, he could share the idea with the group and contribute to the gathering; third, the other children could realize that their classmate wanted and was able to communicate with the others, and even “heard his voice” for the first time; fourth: new opportunities for communication and the sharing of knowledge, experiences and thoughts appeared in the group. These changes did not occur until the teachers considered how they could improve the child’s participation in DLG, so it was the SEA that encouraged teachers to mobilize the resources that enabled the child’s participation and made these changes possible.

Importantly, the improvements achieved have been sustained and even increased through time as the implementation of SEAs also increased. Awareness of improvements has spread in their communities and that has led, in some cases, to an increased demand to enroll students with special needs in these schools, as Sandra explains in the quote below; this is another way in which the participation and learning opportunities of students with special needs in SEAs have been enhanced:

More families are coming with children with special needs that attended other schools. (…) Here, in the town, all the families know each other. (…) They talk and explain their experiences… and therefore many are requesting a change of school. (Sandra)

Social Impact 2: Transforming Schools’ Approaches to Meeting Students’ Diversity in Terms of Special Needs

The education of students with special needs has changed not only because of increased opportunities to participate in SEAs but also because the dialogic, interactive and transformative approach behind the SEAs has been assumed by the teachers and the entire community to change the way they approach the education of these students at every moment – within and outside SEAs – now being more dialogic, interactive and transformative as well.

Before implementing SEAs, schools tended to respond to students’ special needs through individual attention, often outside the classroom and based on low expectations; they understood the students’ disabilities as an indicator of what the students could achieve. The participation of students with special needs in SEAs has meant a turning point in the schools’ approach to diversity.

A Focus on Interactions to Enhance Students’ Learning Opportunities

Knowing SEAs and their scientific and theoretical bases, especially the relevance of interactions for learning, has meant that teachers who have incorporated SEAs in their schools focus on the interactions they promote. In mainstream schools, the more diverse and rich interactions students found in SEAs was an element that convinced teachers to include the participation of students with special needs and to do the necessary material adaptations to allow that interaction. They could observe improvements in typically developing children, both in learning and coexistence, as a consequence of participating in SEAs, which also encouraged them to include students with special needs and extend these benefits to them, overcoming previous ideas about special education, as Irene explained:

We were intoxicated with the idea that [mainstream] students make progress, but those with special needs need different things, need that we adapt to their learning level… But we have advanced in inclusion as we have been implementing SEAs, because we realized that children with special needs can participate too, and interactions with peers are positive for them to progress, besides self-esteem, seeing they are capable, and that they can improve. (Irene)

In the context of special schools, interactions are also a topic of discussion now, which helps teachers focus on providing their students with the best learning environment possible. For the professionals working there, this has meant an opportunity to give their students richer learning opportunities within their segregated placement:

In our school program, we include what the students will learn, but we also consider and talk very much about the interactions they will have, which is a topic we had never discussed before knowing about SEAs. We focus on the type of interactions they have, if they are quality interactions, if they can have more quality, how we can promote them through SEAs, IG, DLG… (Marta)

Evidence, the SEAs, which explain what is best for our students, give us confidence in our work. We know our way to advance in giving the best results to our students. Therefore, we think of interactions; since they are segregated, we consider which type of interactions we should offer to them. (Ana)

Development of Scientific Thinking About Education

Another consequence of being aware of the benefits of SEAs for students with special needs, as demonstrated by research, has been the development of a more scientific way of thinking among the teaching staff. The teachers interviewed, as well as other teachers in their schools, read scientific publications emerging from or related to this line of research and discussed them in dialogic pedagogical gatherings. This helped them become familiar with research and scientific evidence, and they now look for this evidence when they must make decisions on their students’ education:

Now we say: “But is there evidence for it? Let’s see who has written about that” (…) for instance, when we are working on autism, [we want to know] if what we implement is based on scientific evidence or not, and what the most recent research about autism says. It has emerged from having implemented evidence and talking about evidence. (Marta)

Once the teachers learned that there is scientific evidence behind the success achieved by SEAs, they looked for evidence-based actions, practices or programs in any aspect of their professional activity, which increased their chances of enhancing students’ education, not only when the students participate in SEAs but at any moment they are at school. SEA participation therefore increases the potential social impact that other research in education and psychology of education can have, as these teachers look for the evidence of previous improvements achieved and reported by this research to transfer them to their own context and achieve similar improvements.

Changing Teachers’ Minds and Talk About Students With Special Needs

In relation to the scientific view of education, teachers have changed the way they think and talk about their students, focusing not on the students’ disabilities but on what the teachers can do to transform the educational context and improve the education of such students. These teachers do not ask whether students with special needs can participate in SEAs; they start from the premise they can, and they think on the way they can facilitate their students’ participation through, for instance, necessary adaptations. These teachers believe that this way of thinking about their students has made them improve as teachers, as their professional performance is permeated by language of possibilities:

We realize that we have a different approach, I mean, [we think about] how are we going to include these students or how are we going to promote interactions with them. And we did not have this perspective before. As a school, having had scientific evidence within reach made us improve our teaching practice, reconsider many things, and find meaning. (Marta)

At the personal level, we have improved our dialogues about what is best for our students. We are advancing in this direction, always putting the focus on the students, on what we will achieve, on the fact that this is the best for them. (Ana)

Rethinking and Reorganizing Specialized Support Within and Beyond SEAs

Implementing SEAs with students with special needs entailed rethinking the role of special education teachers, speech therapists and other specialized support. While these professionals used to work outside the class to provide individualized support to students with special needs, usually based on different curricular material of lower academic level, when SEAs started to be implemented, teachers agreed with these specialists that students with special needs would not leave the classroom. Instead, these professionals started to enter the classroom to support students in IG. When the class was not organized in IG, teachers kept the criteria of organizing heterogeneous groups of students to facilitate the inclusion of students with special needs, and specialists also provided support there. Speech therapists, who, in some cases, were more reluctant to change their role into a more inclusive role, also agreed to participate in SEAs by preparing activities for IG or supporting students in DLG.

One of the first things we were clear about was that these students would not leave the classroom and would be distributed within the classroom in heterogeneous groups, and at the same time, we started working in IG and DLG. (…) In my school, all of them used to leave the classroom and had different curricular materials. Objectives were set with very low expectations, low academic objectives, and then we engaged in debates and there were several changes. (…) On the one hand, the role of the speech therapist changed, and this was difficult to achieve because they felt they had lost their identity, their role, (…) but now we work and plan children’s learning together. (Sandra)

In some cases, reading and discussing research publications, such as INCLUD-ED results ( INCLUD-ED Consortium, 2009 ), helped in organizing students and supporting them in a more inclusive way when working in SEAs and beyond, which supported the decision to maintain students with special needs in the class when SEAs were implemented:

Little by little, we saw that all students improved, and we started to do pedagogic gatherings. For instance, I remember that we discussed INCLUD-ED “Actions for success in schools in Europe,” and we emphasized the topic of groupings with the teaching staff because the special education teachers had the idea that they had to take the students with special needs out of the classroom. So, we agreed that when we worked in SEAs, these students would stay in the classroom so that they could participate in the same activities as everyone else. (Ines)

Higher Expectations and Enhanced Learning: Teachers Recovering Meaning in Their Profession

Being aware of SEAs and the improvements promoted and having the opportunity to discuss them and implement them in their school facilitated teachers’ enhanced belief about their students’ potential and, at the same time, gave them the tools to make that potential real; as teachers’ expectations were raised, students’ performances also raised and even surpassing these expectations. This has had an impact on students but also teachers, as some of the teachers reported rediscovering meaning in their profession as a result of being better able to facilitate the learning of students with more difficulties:

I think that the teachers who implement SEAs with our students have found more meaning in teaching, because we see that they learn. We have had high expectations, and even with these high expectations, many times, they have surprised us. We’ve said “I never imagined it could but it happened”, even if we always had high expectations. Sometimes, unintentionally, working with disabilities, we think, “well, we have high expectations, but we will get there one day”, and we are already there. (Marta)

The higher expectations and the possibilities enabled by them has meant a shift, especially in the context of special education, where low expectations and low educational levels predominate, as Ana reflected:

I think that in special schools we can easily find the “happiness curriculum”, that is to say, “poor kids, they have enough with their disability, instead of trying to learn more [let’s make them happier]”. I have worked in several special schools, and I always found colleagues with this attitude. Then, I think that implementing SEAs, and now with the line of research, I think we have realized that we have to change our minds, through dialogue: Why expect less? Let’s go for high expectations, for the best of each student, and see what we can achieve. I think it has been something that has spread in the school, as a result of starting to work in this way with students and other colleagues seeing the results. (Ana)

Importantly, the higher expectations supported by the previous evidence of improvement achieved through SEAs have made it possible for teachers to take on challenges that they would not have taken on before. For instance, Carmen explained that once she learned about the SEAs and their impact at a conference, she decided to implement these actions with the most challenging group at her school. The groups with most challenging students are often those that teachers do not choose to work with and are assigned to the least experienced teachers or those who arrived most recently at the school; however, SEAs make teachers more confident in their ability to improve these students’ educations and, as occurred in the case of Carmen, make them wish to teach precisely the most difficult groups because they know they can make a difference in the education of those students:

I could not understand how it was possible to respond to the diversity we had in the classrooms. I remember that when I arrived at the school I couldn’t, I was overwhelmed, and I remember going at the international conference and seeing it crystal clear. I saw it so clear that I remember we had a class in the school with much diversity, a very special group, and I went to the principal’s office and said, “I need to take this group and implement what I know, what the evidence says that works, to ascertain that it works, and to transform this group”. (…) And the change was amazing. (…) Now I cannot see it in any other way, because now, I feel that any challenge I face, I will succeed. And now, I feel very much like taking the group most in need, the most vulnerable one. For me, it has been awesome working like this. (Carmen)

Social Impact 3: From Mainstream to Special Education Settings: The Transference of SEAs

The expansion of SEAs to new schools has entailed SEAs reaching new educational contexts, some of which are specific contexts in special education. Reaching these new contexts has entailed the opportunity for more inclusive, quality education.

SEAs as a Way to Include Students Segregated in Special Education Classes in the Mainstream Class

As the teachers reported, the inclusion of all students with special needs in SEAs has sometimes been a process, especially when the school serves students with severe disabilities, which directly affects areas of curricular learning. Irene’s school contains a specific classroom for students with language and communication disorders (a communication and language classroom) related to the autism spectrum disorder, which serves students from different municipalities. These students have little or no development of oral language, which makes it difficult for them to participate in actions such as IG and DLG, as such methods are based on dialogue and interaction. Teachers relied from the beginning on research evidence for including in SEAs other students with special needs who attended the mainstream classes. Subsequently, guided by the evidence of the improvements achieved with these students in the school, the students from the communication and language classroom also started to be included in the SEAs.

The students of mainstream classrooms started to participate first. (…) At the beginning, the students with autism, who had many difficulties, who could not speak, did not participate in SEAs; we had not thought about that yet. (…) We still had to break with the idea that we had to teach students with special needs outside the classroom. Then, when we started to include them in the classroom, especially by participating in SEAs, and we saw that the students with difficulties – but who could speak – improved, then we said, “And the other students? The most difficult ones? Let’s see if it is possible”. And it is possible. (Irene)

In this case, the teacher highlighted the importance of adapting some aspects of the development of the activity to facilitate the progressive participation of these students. In the case of students with autism and little language development, the readings for the DLG were prepared with pictograms so that the children could follow the story and express themselves. The teachers prepared the reading and the contribution for the gathering with their families ahead of time. In IG, the students started participating in only one activity, with additional support if necessary, and progressively participated in two or more activities of the IG session.

IG and DLG have made the participation of students who previously shared little learning time with their peers possible in the mainstream classroom, which means that SEAs have had an impact on their educational inclusion and learning opportunities. Furthermore, some of these students have left the communication and language classroom and are now enrolled full time in the mainstream classroom. SEAs have helped to make the possibilities for these students to learn in mainstream inclusive settings more visible and, as a consequence, some students have left open places in the communication and language classroom that can be occupied by students who are now attending special schools. Therefore, in this case, SEAs not only promote the inclusion of students within that school but also open possibilities for more inclusive trajectories for students in other schools.

Pau is a child who came to the communication and language classroom as a child with autism. Today, after having worked with him in the mainstream classroom of peers of the same age, participating in SEAs with interactions has improved his performance at the social level, and now this child is in the mainstream classroom and has left an available place in the communication and language classroom for other children with language difficulties at special schools. That is, we have achieved students who were schooled in the communication and language classroom now being in the mainstream classroom. (Ines)

Transference of SEAs in Special Schools

In the context of Spain, where the research was conducted, 17% of students with special needs are enrolled in special schools ( World Health Organization, 2011 ). According to national law 5 , these are students with disabilities whose special educational needs cannot be met in mainstream schools, the most frequent types of disabilities including intellectual disabilities (36%), multiple disabilities (24%) and pervasive developmental disorder (19%) 6 . Some special schools concerned with providing the best education to their students have also wondered about the possibility of bringing to their schools the educational actions that transformed the education of students with disabilities in mainstream schools. Today, there are 4 special schools that implement SEAs. In Marta and Ana’s school, when the teaching staff started to implement SEAs, no one there had previous experience with implementing SEAs in special schools, so they had to recreate the SEAs in the new context. To ensure proper implementation to achieve the benefits that had already been observed in mainstream schools, they implemented the SEAs progressively and assessed the ongoing results:

In our school, we started with one classroom, and little by little, the number of classrooms that implemented DLG increased. Today, not only has this implementation been sustained, but the number of participants has increased, both in DLG and IG. (…) The results are very positive, because in primary education, at the beginning, only one classroom participated and now 5 entire classrooms participate. (Ana)

The transference of SEAs in their special school was not only sustained but, in time, also increased: similarly to what occurred with mainstream schools, more SEAs have been implemented in more groups and with more diverse children: “We included first children with more speech ability, and little by little we included students with less speech ability to see how we could manage to guarantee that all of them could participate in the SEA” (Marta). “Now, when you look at the timetable for the next school year, you can see that it is full of SEAs” (Ana). This extension in the implementation of SEAs in the school cannot be separated from the students’ progress: it is the improvements such work has achieved that encourages teachers to extend IG and DLG to new groups, students and learning content.

In some cases, preparing the activity with the children ahead of time facilitated their incorporation into the SEA. According to the teachers, using such strategies has made it possible for approximately 80% of the students of preprimary and primary education to participate in IG, and approximately 40% of the students to participate in DLG. In this context of special education and with this group of students, SEAs have also demonstrated improved learning. Language is an area in which most of these students present difficulties, and it is the area of improvement that the teachers have highlighted most, along with an improved coexistence between students:

With the SEAs, new language structures appeared in the students that we never imagined before that they could develop, reasoning, argumentation, first with much help and modeling, but finally, it appeared spontaneously. Then, reading books, which we did not foresee either (…). Expanding their vocabulary. (…) With the SEAs they gain richer vocabulary too. (Marta)

The main results we have seen are improvements in language competence and the quality of their contributions, sentence structures of greater complexity, improvement in explaining their opinions, improved coherence of discourse, taking into account the topic of the debate. (…) Then, an increase in the number of participants in the DLG, better knowledge of the other participants, the creation of new bonds and friendships, and the reduction of coexistence problems. (Ana)

This evidence suggests that SEAs are not limited to a particular type of school or student population but can be effective with very different types of student diversity and educational contexts. According to the teachers, the research on SEAs and special needs had an influence on these improvements achieved in their school:

I think that we could not have achieved it if we would not have this line of research and impact. I mean, it has given us much robustness, a great deal of science to say, “Okay, it has been studied, it works,” and this robustness helped us to transfer, sometimes we say “to recreate,” the SEAs. (Marta)

Building Collaboration Between Special and Mainstream Schools

The replicability of SEAs in special schools was accompanied by the previously mentioned transformation of teachers’ understanding of the education of students with special needs. The focus on learning interactions that both IG and DLG have led teachers in these schools not only to ensure maximum diversity in the interactions within the school by, for instance, grouping students with different disabilities and with different capabilities together, but also to look for interactions with typically developing peers who are educated in mainstream schools. Sharing learning activities with these children in an inclusive learning context entailed new learning opportunities for the special school students in a more normalized environment that could eventually help them prepare for a transition from special education to combined (special-mainstream) education. As Ana explained, in her school, the idea of collaborating with mainstream schools emerged from the high expectations developed and the will to pursue more ambitious objectives for their students. Now, the teachers want to establish this beneficial experience as a regular collaboration and extend it from DLG to IG.

Since we started to work with DLG with our students, we have seen that our objectives in DLG are changing, the same way they are progressing and improving, there is an evolution. They start to structure sentences, ask questions, talk about the topic; then, we see the need to look for higher expectations, that is, there is always a bit more. Then, we thought that as we wanted a bit more, and the ones who could provide it as role models were students of their same age. We wanted them to participate in DLG in the most normalized way possible. (…) When we did it with the [mainstream] school it was a spectacular experience, because new dialogues emerged, our students participated very much spontaneously. (…) Then, the need to create these DLG as something periodical and systematic for the next years emerged, starting with DLG, and then we will continue with IG. Each time a bit more, more inclusion, more interactions, more communication, and more learning. (Ana)

According to the teachers’ experience, the students of both regular and mainstream schools benefited from this experience. The special education students could improve their language and academic learning and find new contexts where they could be accepted and respected, and the mainstream school students had the opportunity to learn more about people with disabilities, including their difficulties and capabilities and how to interact with them, which is learning for life. In one of the mainstream schools that had less experience in implementing DLG, students could even learn from the greater experience students from the special school had with DLG. For both groups of students, many of whom lived in the same town, this collaboration entailed the possibility of coming to know each other and creating bonds beyond the school context:

For the children of the mainstream school, it has brought the opportunity to know students with disabilities and learn how to interact with them; for instance, they live in the same municipality, and maybe they met in the street and they did not interact, they did not know how to talk to each other. The gatherings are above all respect, humanity, a climate of total acceptance, that many times we do not find in society. And our students were able to demonstrate what they knew and had no problem raising their hands and sharing what they knew. Although they needed help, they asked questions to their peers at the mainstream school. I mean, their concerns, their language improvement, I think that apart from the academic and the language improvement, regarding human values it is helping both the mainstream and the special school. (Ana)

The fact that SEAs have been replicated in special schools and there are therefore mainstream and special schools that implement SEAs in the same geographical context has made these collaborations and new learning opportunities for both groups of students possible.

Reaching Other Educational Contexts in the Community

The research on SEAs and students with special needs has also had an impact in other places of the community beyond the school context. An illustrative example explained by Sandra is an association dedicated to people with disabilities that offers activities for children with disabilities. The fact that SEAs are open to the community facilitated the president of the association participating in IG in Sandra’s school, showing how both learning and coexistence improve in IG. In addition, the mother of a child with special needs at Sandra’s school is an active member of the association. These connections with members of this association have caused a change in the association, which is now more oriented toward promoting academic learning among the children and is more impregnated with high expectations, creating new contexts where learning and inclusion can be enhanced:

This summer, the association is promoting instrumental learning for the first time; they are doing homework, which they had done never before, and they are very satisfied. And also, the issue of the evidence (…) she told me the other day that a girl with autism had come, the family explained that she had behaviors such as pulling hair, pushing, and she told them, “Don’t worry, we are changing it”, and the mother was very happy, and she was happy too (…) They are learning to read and write since preprimary, and the families are really satisfied… This has been a big change, because they did not think like this before. (Sandra)

Factors Supporting Social Impact

The interviews held with teachers about the impacts achieved have also shown several factors that contributed to these impacts, mainly via supporting the sustainability and replicability of the actions and the promoted improvements. It is important to summarize these factors here because taking them into account may contribute to an enhanced social impact of the research.

Teachers’ Permanent Training Based on Scientific Evidence

As mentioned above, a more scientific approach to education was one of the impacts achieved for teachers. This was translated into the practice of regularly reading scientific texts related to their profession, which, in turn, reinforced this scientific view. Some schools organized seminars in which the teaching staff debated these texts, and in other cases, teachers attended seminars or meetings with teachers from other schools. The texts that they read and debated included articles, books and reports resulting from this line of research and other scientific publications related to teaching and learning that could help them solve problems they encountered and improve their practice. According to the interviewed teachers, sharing this space of learning and debate has been a help in replicating the SEAs in new classes or schools and in bringing the SEAs to more students; it has also been a source of sustainability when the barriers found in the implementation of SEAs were shared and discussed:

Training is essential. As we read about the evidence and debated it, if we had a preconceived idea, we said, “No, this is true, it is as you say, this girl may be able to do that”. I think that training has been and still is essential for all this, because theory gives us a clue to put everything into practice. If we know the theory, then it is very easy. (…) We have to know first, we have to learn first. And then we see it very clearly. (Carmen)

Gaining confidence and feeling empowered to implement the actions that are supported by research has also been an effect of the teachers having access to scientific knowledge:

We emphasized very much that evidence says that children improve more with inclusion, that is, not taking them out of the classroom, if you do not group them separately… Then, you get empowered, and say, “This is really what we have to do; every time, if we could do that it would be ideal”. Then, you change your outlook a bit. (…) Because we came from another paradigm, we had another trajectory, and with the training we started to see things more clearly; we got empowered and said, “It has to be done this way, it is demonstrated that it is best, so let’s do it”. (Ines)

Teamwork and Networks of Support

Another facilitator of social impact highlighted by the teachers was the availability of a network of support among teachers and schools. The previously mentioned seminars are one place where some of these networks have been created. The previous experiences of other colleagues that are shared in these spaces have encouraged new teachers to implement SEAs and have also helped solve doubts and difficulties in the implementation of SEAs. These networks of support have made possible, for instance, collaborations between special and mainstream schools in sharing SEAs. Irene explained that this was an important factor in her case; the same way that special schools took the progress achieved in mainstream schools as a reference to replicate the SEAs in their context, Irene’s school took one special school as evidence of the possibilities for successfully implementing SEAs in her school:

The more positive, inclusive, rich, high expectations and interactions you have in more contexts with other professionals that are implementing SEAs in other schools and see that it is possible, that a special school is doing it and it is possible, and they improve… the more things like that you listen to throughout your professional life, and the more people you can share these spaces with, the more you empower yourself… and finally, you do it, because you believe it is true that it is possible and that you are going to make it. (Irene)

Recording Results and Being Aware of the Improvements Achieved

For teachers, it was also important to have a record of the students’ results related to the SEAs so that they could register progress and be fully aware of the improvements achieved. Some schools had more systematic records than others, and some of them were aware that they had to improve their recordkeeping, but all of them agreed on the importance of gathering this evidence, as it demonstrates teachers they are doing well and encourages the continuance of their work:

Results, because in daily life the inertia doesn’t let us see progress, but it is very important to talk about it with colleagues: “Look at what we have achieved,” “Look, this child could not do that and now he does”. When we verbalize it, we realize all we are achieving. (Carmen)

Sharing the Impact of SEAs With Families

When schools share the development and outcomes of SEAs not only among teachers but also with students’ families, the latter also become active supporters of these actions. This information can be shared in the schools’ seminars or assemblies that are open to families, in individual meetings with the family of a particular student, or while developing the SEAs if families participate, for example, as volunteers in IG. This information has led, for instance, to families not authorizing their children with special needs to receive support outside the classroom – because they know their children can progress further by participating in SEAs in their classroom—or agreeing that their child can stay in the school one more year so as to continue taking advantage of learning in SEAs.

Within education, I think that special education is the great forgotten area, and, with this research, I really believe that now is our time. I think that special education is starting to be visible and show that with them [students with disabilities], it is also possible. (…) I believe that it is our moment and I hope that this research helps all students and that finally, inclusion becomes a reality that we achieve between all. (Ana, teacher at a special school)

Ana, with these words, tried to synthesize what the actual and potential social impact of the line of research was for teachers such as her. Research conducted on SEAs and students with disabilities and other special educational needs allowed the identification of benefits that these educational actions entailed for these children in the schools that were already implementing them. Subsequently, this evidence has reached new schools, bringing these improvements to new student populations and improving teachers’ professional experiences, thus achieving a social impact that, as Ana said, is contributing to transforming special education.

This line of research is an example of the body of research in the psychology of education that studies several aspects of the education of students with special needs, creating interventions that improve their learning and coexistence with peers or bringing forth scientific evidence on which effective educational programs can be based. As interaction and dialogue are key components of SEAs, we argue that the evidence collected on the impact of SEAs on students with special needs shows the transformative potential of the sociocultural approach of learning ( Vygotsky, 1980 ; Bruner, 1996 ) for the education of these students. Because evidence on the social impact of this line of research was obtained from a limited number of interviews, conclusions must be cautiously made. However, there is evidence supporting the achievement of social impact. The criteria defined by SIOR 7 , the Social Impact Open Repository that aims at monitoring, evaluating and improving the impact of research, enables the analysis of how social impact is approached, as well as the limitations that can be addressed to further enhance social impact achievements.

(1) Connection of research with the social priority goals of sustainable development. The line of research responds to UN Sustainable Development Goal 4 on Quality Education: Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all. Therefore, the research is aligned with one of the social priorities.

(2) Percentage of improvement achieved regarding the departure situation. The interviews conducted allowed the collection of evidence on the improvements achieved in terms of the students’ learning and improved coexistence and the schools’ more efficient response to student diversity. However, an accurate and quantified record of the academic and/or social improvements of these students has not been systematized. Therefore, evidence of the social impact would be enhanced with a more systematic procedure to collect and quantify the improvements.

(3) Transferability of the impact: the actions based on the project’s results have been successfully applied in more than one context. Transferability has been achieved in different directions: first, replicating the SEAs in mainstream schools with the participation of students with special needs in these schools; second, recreating the SEAs in special schools, thus transferring the actions to a new student population; and third, transferring the SEAs to other out-of-school educational contexts in the community.

(4) Scientific, political, and social dissemination. The benefits of SEAs for students with disabilities and other special needs have been disseminated through scientific publications, conferences and training for teachers and schools. Importantly, this dissemination has been a key component for the transferability and sustainability of the impact, according to the evidence collected and is associated with the scientific training of teachers, who used such publications to learn from and discuss the evidence and transform their own professional practice.

(5) Sustainability of the impact achieved. According to the evidence collected, in all the new contexts and new populations of students where SEAs have been transferred, the intensity of the implementation has not only been sustained but also increased, and the same occurred with the improvements achieved. Although an accurate quantification of the improvement is not yet available, the experience of the sample of teachers who were involved in the transference of the SEAs and still implement them in their own context points in this direction.

Taking this into account, further research on SEAs and students with special needs with social impact could cover four aspects. First, to analyze how SEAs put into practice contributions from theory in the psychology of education to support the learning and development of children with special needs more in depth. Second, to define a procedure to collect and quantify the improvements achieved by the students as a result of participating in SEAs. The INTER-ACT project, which is currently advancing this line of research, will contribute to quantifying this improvement and strengthening the evidence of the research’s social impact. Third, to support the transference of the SEAs and the improvements associated with them to new schools. Additional impact is foreseen in this regard, as the ongoing INTER-ACT project will transfer SEAs to new mainstream and special schools and will add further evidence on the key elements for the transferability of SEAs to new contexts with students with special needs and those without. Finally, to extend the interactive understanding of learning and development beyond schools and the teaching and learning contexts, reaching other related professionals and activities, such as evaluation, attention and counseling related to special needs; these areas of intervention are still very much impregnated with an individualistic perspective more aligned with the medical model than with the social model of disability, and students and schools would benefit from coordinated work based on the evidence of the benefits of the interactive approach of SEAs.

Data Availability Statement

The datasets generated for this study are available on request to the corresponding author.

Ethics Statement

The study was fully approved by the Ethics Board of the Community of Researchers on Excellence for All (CREA). The participants provided their written informed consent to participate in this study.

Author Contributions

SM conceived the original idea with the support of ER. ED conducted the literature review. SM with the support of RG analyzed the results of the line of research (case studies) from the perspective of social impact. ER coordinated the data collection (interviews) on social impact. SM conducted the interviews, and transcribed and analyzed them with the support of RG and ED. SM wrote a full draft of the manuscript. ED, ER, and RG revised it and included corrections. SM revised the final version of the manuscript.

This work was supported by the INTER-ACT, Interactive Learning Environments for the Inclusion of Students With and Without Disabilities: Improving Learning, Development and Relationships. Spanish National Programme for Research Aimed at the Challenges of Society, Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness. Reference Number: EDU2017-88666-R.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

• ^ The Ethics Board was composed of Dr. Marta Soler (president), who has expertise in the evaluation of projects from the European Framework Programme of Research of the European Union and of European projects in the area of ethics; Dr. Teresa Sordé, who has expertise in the evaluation of projects from the European Framework Programme of Research and is researcher in the area of Roma studies; Dr. Patricia Melgar, a founding member of the Catalan Platform Against Gender Violence and a researcher in the area of gender and gender violence; Dr. Sandra Racionero, a former secretary and member of the Ethics Board at Loyola University Andalusia (2016-2018) and a review panel member for COST action proposals in the area of health; Dr. Cristina Pulido, an expert in data protection policies and child protection in research and communication and a researcher in communication studies; Dr. Oriol Rios, a founding member of the “Men in Dialogue” association, a researcher in the area of masculinities, and the editor of “Masculinities and Social Change,” a journal indexed in WoS and Scopus; and Dr. Esther Oliver, who has expertise in the evaluation of projects from the European Framework Programme of Research and is a researcher in the area of gender violence.
• ^ Schools as Learning Communities in Spain: http://utopiadream.info/ca/centros-en-funcionamiento/caracteristicas/
• ^ Schools as Learning Communities in Europe: Successful Educational Actions for all (SEAS4ALL). ERASMUS + Programme. Record number: 2015-1-ES01-KA201-016327. https://seas4all.eu/ ; Social transformation through Educational Policies based on Successful Educational Actions (STEP4SEAS). ERASMUS + Programme. Record number: 11. 580432-EPP-1-2016-1-ES-EPPKA3-IPI-SOC-IN. https://www.step4seas.eu/
• ^ 2018 Report of the Schools as Learning Communities network in Latin America https://www.comunidaddeaprendizaje.com.es/uploads/materials/579/352de6fce741a0d1e6d17c67944cec2c.pdf
• ^ Ley Orgánica de Educación [Organic Law of Education] (LOE), of 2006, amended by the Ley Orgánica para la Mejora de la Calidad Educativa [Organic Law for the Improvement of Quality of Education] (LOMCE), of 2013.
• ^ Spanish Ministry of Education and Vocational Training. Statistics on Education. School year 2017-2018. https://www.educacionyfp.gob.es/servicios-al-ciudadano/estadisticas/no-universitaria/alumnado/matriculado/2017-2018-rd.html
• ^ https://sior.ub.edu/indicators

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Keywords : social impact, psychology of education, special educational needs, interactive groups, dialogic literary gatherings

Citation: Duque E, Gairal R, Molina S and Roca E (2020) How the Psychology of Education Contributes to Research With a Social Impact on the Education of Students With Special Needs: The Case of Successful Educational Actions. Front. Psychol. 11:439. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00439

Received: 23 September 2019; Accepted: 25 February 2020; Published: 13 March 2020.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2020 Duque, Gairal, Molina and Roca. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Silvia Molina, [email protected]

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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Philosophy of Education

Philosophy of education is the branch of applied or practical philosophy concerned with the nature and aims of education and the philosophical problems arising from educational theory and practice. Because that practice is ubiquitous in and across human societies, its social and individual manifestations so varied, and its influence so profound, the subject is wide-ranging, involving issues in ethics and social/political philosophy, epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind and language, and other areas of philosophy. Because it looks both inward to the parent discipline and outward to educational practice and the social, legal, and institutional contexts in which it takes place, philosophy of education concerns itself with both sides of the traditional theory/practice divide. Its subject matter includes both basic philosophical issues (e.g., the nature of the knowledge worth teaching, the character of educational equality and justice, etc.) and problems concerning specific educational policies and practices (e.g., the desirability of standardized curricula and testing, the social, economic, legal and moral dimensions of specific funding arrangements, the justification of curriculum decisions, etc.). In all this the philosopher of education prizes conceptual clarity, argumentative rigor, the fair-minded consideration of the interests of all involved in or affected by educational efforts and arrangements, and informed and well-reasoned valuation of educational aims and interventions.

Philosophy of education has a long and distinguished history in the Western philosophical tradition, from Socrates’ battles with the sophists to the present day. Many of the most distinguished figures in that tradition incorporated educational concerns into their broader philosophical agendas (Curren 2000, 2018; Rorty 1998). While that history is not the focus here, it is worth noting that the ideals of reasoned inquiry championed by Socrates and his descendants have long informed the view that education should foster in all students, to the extent possible, the disposition to seek reasons and the ability to evaluate them cogently, and to be guided by their evaluations in matters of belief, action and judgment. This view, that education centrally involves the fostering of reason or rationality, has with varying articulations and qualifications been embraced by most of those historical figures; it continues to be defended by contemporary philosophers of education as well (Scheffler 1973 [1989]; Siegel 1988, 1997, 2007, 2017). As with any philosophical thesis it is controversial; some dimensions of the controversy are explored below.

This entry is a selective survey of important contemporary work in Anglophone philosophy of education; it does not treat in detail recent scholarship outside that context.

1. Problems in Delineating the Field

2. analytic philosophy of education and its influence, 3.1 the content of the curriculum and the aims and functions of schooling, 3.2 social, political and moral philosophy, 3.3 social epistemology, virtue epistemology, and the epistemology of education, 3.4 philosophical disputes concerning empirical education research, 4. concluding remarks, other internet resources, related entries.

The inward/outward looking nature of the field of philosophy of education alluded to above makes the task of delineating the field, of giving an over-all picture of the intellectual landscape, somewhat complicated (for a detailed account of this topography, see Phillips 1985, 2010). Suffice it to say that some philosophers, as well as focusing inward on the abstract philosophical issues that concern them, are drawn outwards to discuss or comment on issues that are more commonly regarded as falling within the purview of professional educators, educational researchers, policy-makers and the like. (An example is Michael Scriven, who in his early career was a prominent philosopher of science; later he became a central figure in the development of the field of evaluation of educational and social programs. See Scriven 1991a, 1991b.) At the same time, there are professionals in the educational or closely related spheres who are drawn to discuss one or another of the philosophical issues that they encounter in the course of their work. (An example here is the behaviorist psychologist B.F. Skinner, the central figure in the development of operant conditioning and programmed learning, who in works such as Walden Two (1948) and Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1972) grappled—albeit controversially—with major philosophical issues that were related to his work.)

What makes the field even more amorphous is the existence of works on educational topics, written by well-regarded philosophers who have made major contributions to their discipline; these educational reflections have little or no philosophical content, illustrating the truth that philosophers do not always write philosophy. However, despite this, works in this genre have often been treated as contributions to philosophy of education. (Examples include John Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education [1693] and Bertrand Russell’s rollicking pieces written primarily to raise funds to support a progressive school he ran with his wife. (See Park 1965.)

Finally, as indicated earlier, the domain of education is vast, the issues it raises are almost overwhelmingly numerous and are of great complexity, and the social significance of the field is second to none. These features make the phenomena and problems of education of great interest to a wide range of socially-concerned intellectuals, who bring with them their own favored conceptual frameworks—concepts, theories and ideologies, methods of analysis and argumentation, metaphysical and other assumptions, and the like. It is not surprising that scholars who work in this broad genre also find a home in the field of philosophy of education.

As a result of these various factors, the significant intellectual and social trends of the past few centuries, together with the significant developments in philosophy, all have had an impact on the content of arguments and methods of argumentation in philosophy of education—Marxism, psycho-analysis, existentialism, phenomenology, positivism, post-modernism, pragmatism, neo-liberalism, the several waves of feminism, analytic philosophy in both its ordinary language and more formal guises, are merely the tip of the iceberg.

Conceptual analysis, careful assessment of arguments, the rooting out of ambiguity, the drawing of clarifying distinctions—all of which are at least part of the philosophical toolkit—have been respected activities within philosophy from the dawn of the field. No doubt it somewhat over-simplifies the complex path of intellectual history to suggest that what happened in the twentieth century—early on, in the home discipline itself, and with a lag of a decade or more in philosophy of education—is that philosophical analysis came to be viewed by some scholars as being the major philosophical activity (or set of activities), or even as being the only viable or reputable activity. In any case, as they gained prominence and for a time hegemonic influence during the rise of analytic philosophy early in the twentieth century analytic techniques came to dominate philosophy of education in the middle third of that century (Curren, Robertson, & Hager 2003).

The pioneering work in the modern period entirely in an analytic mode was the short monograph by C.D. Hardie, Truth and Fallacy in Educational Theory (1941; reissued in 1962). In his Introduction, Hardie (who had studied with C.D. Broad and I.A. Richards) made it clear that he was putting all his eggs into the ordinary-language-analysis basket:

The Cambridge analytical school, led by Moore, Broad and Wittgenstein, has attempted so to analyse propositions that it will always be apparent whether the disagreement between philosophers is one concerning matters of fact, or is one concerning the use of words, or is, as is frequently the case, a purely emotive one. It is time, I think, that a similar attitude became common in the field of educational theory. (Hardie 1962: xix)

About a decade after the end of the Second World War the floodgates opened and a stream of work in the analytic mode appeared; the following is merely a sample. D. J. O’Connor published An Introduction to Philosophy of Education (1957) in which, among other things, he argued that the word “theory” as it is used in educational contexts is merely a courtesy title, for educational theories are nothing like what bear this title in the natural sciences. Israel Scheffler, who became the paramount philosopher of education in North America, produced a number of important works including The Language of Education (1960), which contained clarifying and influential analyses of definitions (he distinguished reportive, stipulative, and programmatic types) and the logic of slogans (often these are literally meaningless, and, he argued, should be seen as truncated arguments), Conditions of Knowledge (1965), still the best introduction to the epistemological side of philosophy of education, and Reason and Teaching (1973 [1989]), which in a wide-ranging and influential series of essays makes the case for regarding the fostering of rationality/critical thinking as a fundamental educational ideal (cf. Siegel 2016). B. O. Smith and R. H. Ennis edited the volume Language and Concepts in Education (1961); and R.D. Archambault edited Philosophical Analysis and Education (1965), consisting of essays by a number of prominent British writers, most notably R. S. Peters (whose status in Britain paralleled that of Scheffler in the United States), Paul Hirst, and John Wilson. Topics covered in the Archambault volume were typical of those that became the “bread and butter” of analytic philosophy of education (APE) throughout the English-speaking world—education as a process of initiation, liberal education, the nature of knowledge, types of teaching, and instruction versus indoctrination.

Among the most influential products of APE was the analysis developed by Hirst and Peters (1970) and Peters (1973) of the concept of education itself. Using as a touchstone “normal English usage,” it was concluded that a person who has been educated (rather than instructed or indoctrinated) has been (i) changed for the better; (ii) this change has involved the acquisition of knowledge and intellectual skills and the development of understanding; and (iii) the person has come to care for, or be committed to, the domains of knowledge and skill into which he or she has been initiated. The method used by Hirst and Peters comes across clearly in their handling of the analogy with the concept of “reform”, one they sometimes drew upon for expository purposes. A criminal who has been reformed has changed for the better, and has developed a commitment to the new mode of life (if one or other of these conditions does not hold, a speaker of standard English would not say the criminal has been reformed). Clearly the analogy with reform breaks down with respect to the knowledge and understanding conditions. Elsewhere Peters developed the fruitful notion of “education as initiation”.

The concept of indoctrination was also of great interest to analytic philosophers of education, for, it was argued, getting clear about precisely what constitutes indoctrination also would serve to clarify the border that demarcates it from acceptable educational processes. Thus, whether or not an instructional episode was a case of indoctrination was determined by the content taught, the intention of the instructor, the methods of instruction used, the outcomes of the instruction, or by some combination of these. Adherents of the different analyses used the same general type of argument to make their case, namely, appeal to normal and aberrant usage. Unfortunately, ordinary language analysis did not lead to unanimity of opinion about where this border was located, and rival analyses of the concept were put forward (Snook 1972). The danger of restricting analysis to ordinary language (“normal English usage”) was recognized early on by Scheffler, whose preferred view of analysis emphasized

first, its greater sophistication as regards language, and the interpenetration of language and inquiry, second, its attempt to follow the modern example of the sciences in empirical spirit, in rigor, in attention to detail, in respect for alternatives, and in objectivity of method, and third, its use of techniques of symbolic logic brought to full development only in the last fifty years… It is…this union of scientific spirit and logical method applied toward the clarification of basic ideas that characterizes current analytic philosophy [and that ought to characterize analytic philosophy of education]. (Scheffler 1973 [1989: 9–10])

After a period of dominance, for a number of important reasons the influence of APE went into decline. First, there were growing criticisms that the work of analytic philosophers of education had become focused upon minutiae and in the main was bereft of practical import. (It is worth noting that a 1966 article in Time , reprinted in Lucas 1969, had put forward the same criticism of mainstream philosophy.) Second, in the early 1970’s radical students in Britain accused Peters’ brand of linguistic analysis of conservatism, and of tacitly giving support to “traditional values”—they raised the issue of whose English usage was being analyzed?

Third, criticisms of language analysis in mainstream philosophy had been mounting for some time, and finally after a lag of many years were reaching the attention of philosophers of education; there even had been a surprising degree of interest on the part of the general reading public in the United Kingdom as early as 1959, when Gilbert Ryle, editor of the journal Mind , refused to commission a review of Ernest Gellner’s Words and Things (1959)—a detailed and quite acerbic critique of Wittgenstein’s philosophy and its espousal of ordinary language analysis. (Ryle argued that Gellner’s book was too insulting, a view that drew Bertrand Russell into the fray on Gellner’s side—in the daily press, no less; Russell produced a list of insulting remarks drawn from the work of great philosophers of the past. See Mehta 1963.)

Richard Peters had been given warning that all was not well with APE at a conference in Canada in 1966; after delivering a paper on “The aims of education: A conceptual inquiry” that was based on ordinary language analysis, a philosopher in the audience (William Dray) asked Peters “ whose concepts do we analyze?” Dray went on to suggest that different people, and different groups within society, have different concepts of education. Five years before the radical students raised the same issue, Dray pointed to the possibility that what Peters had presented under the guise of a “logical analysis” was nothing but the favored usage of a certain class of persons—a class that Peters happened to identify with (see Peters 1973, where to the editor’s credit the interaction with Dray is reprinted).

Fourth, during the decade of the seventies when these various critiques of analytic philosophy were in the process of eroding its luster, a spate of translations from the Continent stimulated some philosophers of education in Britain and North America to set out in new directions, and to adopt a new style of writing and argumentation. Key works by Gadamer, Foucault and Derrida appeared in English, and these were followed in 1984 by Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition . The classic works of Heidegger and Husserl also found new admirers; and feminist philosophers of education were finding their voices—Maxine Greene published a number of pieces in the 1970s and 1980s, including The Dialectic of Freedom (1988); the influential book by Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education , appeared the same year as the work by Lyotard, followed a year later by Jane Roland Martin’s Reclaiming a Conversation . In more recent years all these trends have continued. APE was and is no longer the center of interest, although, as indicated below, it still retains its voice.

3. Areas of Contemporary Activity

As was stressed at the outset, the field of education is huge and contains within it a virtually inexhaustible number of issues that are of philosophical interest. To attempt comprehensive coverage of how philosophers of education have been working within this thicket would be a quixotic task for a large single volume and is out of the question for a solitary encyclopedia entry. Nevertheless, a valiant attempt to give an overview was made in A Companion to the Philosophy of Education (Curren 2003), which contains more than six-hundred pages divided into forty-five chapters each of which surveys a subfield of work. The following random selection of chapter topics gives a sense of the enormous scope of the field: Sex education, special education, science education, aesthetic education, theories of teaching and learning, religious education, knowledge, truth and learning, cultivating reason, the measurement of learning, multicultural education, education and the politics of identity, education and standards of living, motivation and classroom management, feminism, critical theory, postmodernism, romanticism, the purposes of universities, affirmative action in higher education, and professional education. The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Education (Siegel 2009) contains a similarly broad range of articles on (among other things) the epistemic and moral aims of education, liberal education and its imminent demise, thinking and reasoning, fallibilism and fallibility, indoctrination, authenticity, the development of rationality, Socratic teaching, educating the imagination, caring and empathy in moral education, the limits of moral education, the cultivation of character, values education, curriculum and the value of knowledge, education and democracy, art and education, science education and religious toleration, constructivism and scientific methods, multicultural education, prejudice, authority and the interests of children, and on pragmatist, feminist, and postmodernist approaches to philosophy of education.

Given this enormous range, there is no non-arbitrary way to select a small number of topics for further discussion, nor can the topics that are chosen be pursued in great depth. The choice of those below has been made with an eye to highlighting contemporary work that makes solid contact with and contributes to important discussions in general philosophy and/or the academic educational and educational research communities.

The issue of what should be taught to students at all levels of education—the issue of curriculum content—obviously is a fundamental one, and it is an extraordinarily difficult one with which to grapple. In tackling it, care needs to be taken to distinguish between education and schooling—for although education can occur in schools, so can mis-education, and many other things can take place there that are educationally orthogonal (such as the provision of free or subsidized lunches and the development of social networks); and it also must be recognized that education can occur in the home, in libraries and museums, in churches and clubs, in solitary interaction with the public media, and the like.

In developing a curriculum (whether in a specific subject area, or more broadly as the whole range of offerings in an educational institution or system), a number of difficult decisions need to be made. Issues such as the proper ordering or sequencing of topics in the chosen subject, the time to be allocated to each topic, the lab work or excursions or projects that are appropriate for particular topics, can all be regarded as technical issues best resolved either by educationists who have a depth of experience with the target age group or by experts in the psychology of learning and the like. But there are deeper issues, ones concerning the validity of the justifications that have been given for including/excluding particular subjects or topics in the offerings of formal educational institutions. (Why should evolution or creation “science” be included, or excluded, as a topic within the standard high school subject Biology? Is the justification that is given for teaching Economics in some schools coherent and convincing? Do the justifications for including/excluding materials on birth control, patriotism, the Holocaust or wartime atrocities in the curriculum in some school districts stand up to critical scrutiny?)

The different justifications for particular items of curriculum content that have been put forward by philosophers and others since Plato’s pioneering efforts all draw, explicitly or implicitly, upon the positions that the respective theorists hold about at least three sets of issues.

First, what are the aims and/or functions of education (aims and functions are not necessarily the same)? Many aims have been proposed; a short list includes the production of knowledge and knowledgeable students, the fostering of curiosity and inquisitiveness, the enhancement of understanding, the enlargement of the imagination, the civilizing of students, the fostering of rationality and/or autonomy, and the development in students of care, concern and associated dispositions and attitudes (see Siegel 2007 for a longer list). The justifications offered for all such aims have been controversial, and alternative justifications of a single proposed aim can provoke philosophical controversy. Consider the aim of autonomy. Aristotle asked, what constitutes the good life and/or human flourishing, such that education should foster these (Curren 2013)? These two formulations are related, for it is arguable that our educational institutions should aim to equip individuals to pursue this good life—although this is not obvious, both because it is not clear that there is one conception of the good or flourishing life that is the good or flourishing life for everyone, and it is not clear that this is a question that should be settled in advance rather than determined by students for themselves. Thus, for example, if our view of human flourishing includes the capacity to think and act autonomously, then the case can be made that educational institutions—and their curricula—should aim to prepare, or help to prepare, autonomous individuals. A rival justification of the aim of autonomy, associated with Kant, champions the educational fostering of autonomy not on the basis of its contribution to human flourishing, but rather the obligation to treat students with respect as persons (Scheffler 1973 [1989]; Siegel 1988). Still others urge the fostering of autonomy on the basis of students’ fundamental interests, in ways that draw upon both Aristotelian and Kantian conceptual resources (Brighouse 2005, 2009). It is also possible to reject the fostering of autonomy as an educational aim (Hand 2006).

Assuming that the aim can be justified, how students should be helped to become autonomous or develop a conception of the good life and pursue it is of course not immediately obvious, and much philosophical ink has been spilled on the general question of how best to determine curriculum content. One influential line of argument was developed by Paul Hirst, who argued that knowledge is essential for developing and then pursuing a conception of the good life, and because logical analysis shows, he argued, that there are seven basic forms of knowledge, the case can be made that the function of the curriculum is to introduce students to each of these forms (Hirst 1965; see Phillips 1987: ch. 11). Another, suggested by Scheffler, is that curriculum content should be selected so as “to help the learner attain maximum self-sufficiency as economically as possible.” The relevant sorts of economy include those of resources, teacher effort, student effort, and the generalizability or transfer value of content, while the self-sufficiency in question includes

self-awareness, imaginative weighing of alternative courses of action, understanding of other people’s choices and ways of life, decisiveness without rigidity, emancipation from stereotyped ways of thinking and perceiving…empathy… intuition, criticism and independent judgment. (Scheffler 1973 [1989: 123–5])

Both impose important constraints on the curricular content to be taught.

Second, is it justifiable to treat the curriculum of an educational institution as a vehicle for furthering the socio-political interests and goals of a dominant group, or any particular group, including one’s own; and relatedly, is it justifiable to design the curriculum so that it serves as an instrument of control or of social engineering? In the closing decades of the twentieth century there were numerous discussions of curriculum theory, particularly from Marxist and postmodern perspectives, that offered the sobering analysis that in many educational systems, including those in Western democracies, the curriculum did indeed reflect and serve the interests of powerful cultural elites. What to do about this situation (if it is indeed the situation of contemporary educational institutions) is far from clear and is the focus of much work at the interface of philosophy of education and social/political philosophy, some of which is discussed in the next section. A closely related question is this: ought educational institutions be designed to further pre-determined social ends, or rather to enable students to competently evaluate all such ends? Scheffler argued that we should opt for the latter: we must

surrender the idea of shaping or molding the mind of the pupil. The function of education…is rather to liberate the mind, strengthen its critical powers, [and] inform it with knowledge and the capacity for independent inquiry. (Scheffler 1973 [1989: 139])

Third, should educational programs at the elementary and secondary levels be made up of a number of disparate offerings, so that individuals with different interests and abilities and affinities for learning can pursue curricula that are suitable? Or should every student pursue the same curriculum as far as each is able?—a curriculum, it should be noted, that in past cases nearly always was based on the needs or interests of those students who were academically inclined or were destined for elite social roles. Mortimer Adler and others in the late twentieth century sometimes used the aphorism “the best education for the best is the best education for all.”

The thinking here can be explicated in terms of the analogy of an out-of-control virulent disease, for which there is only one type of medicine available; taking a large dose of this medicine is extremely beneficial, and the hope is that taking only a little—while less effective—is better than taking none at all. Medically, this is dubious, while the educational version—forcing students to work, until they exit the system, on topics that do not interest them and for which they have no facility or motivation—has even less merit. (For a critique of Adler and his Paideia Proposal , see Noddings 2015.) It is interesting to compare the modern “one curriculum track for all” position with Plato’s system outlined in the Republic , according to which all students—and importantly this included girls—set out on the same course of study. Over time, as they moved up the educational ladder it would become obvious that some had reached the limit imposed upon them by nature, and they would be directed off into appropriate social roles in which they would find fulfillment, for their abilities would match the demands of these roles. Those who continued on with their education would eventually become members of the ruling class of Guardians.

The publication of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice in 1971 was the most notable event in the history of political philosophy over the last century. The book spurred a period of ferment in political philosophy that included, among other things, new research on educationally fundamental themes. The principles of justice in educational distribution have perhaps been the dominant theme in this literature, and Rawls’s influence on its development has been pervasive.

Rawls’s theory of justice made so-called “fair equality of opportunity” one of its constitutive principles. Fair equality of opportunity entailed that the distribution of education would not put the children of those who currently occupied coveted social positions at any competitive advantage over other, equally talented and motivated children seeking the qualifications for those positions (Rawls 1971: 72–75). Its purpose was to prevent socio-economic differences from hardening into social castes that were perpetuated across generations. One obvious criticism of fair equality of opportunity is that it does not prohibit an educational distribution that lavished resources on the most talented children while offering minimal opportunities to others. So long as untalented students from wealthy families were assigned opportunities no better than those available to their untalented peers among the poor, no breach of the principle would occur. Even the most moderate egalitarians might find such a distributive regime to be intuitively repugnant.

Repugnance might be mitigated somewhat by the ways in which the overall structure of Rawls’s conception of justice protects the interests of those who fare badly in educational competition. All citizens must enjoy the same basic liberties, and equal liberty always has moral priority over equal opportunity: the former can never be compromised to advance the latter. Further, inequality in the distribution of income and wealth are permitted only to the degree that it serves the interests of the least advantaged group in society. But even with these qualifications, fair equality of opportunity is arguably less than really fair to anyone. The fact that their education should secure ends other than access to the most selective social positions—ends such as artistic appreciation, the kind of self-knowledge that humanistic study can furnish, or civic virtue—is deemed irrelevant according to Rawls’s principle. But surely it is relevant, given that a principle of educational justice must be responsive to the full range of educationally important goods.

Suppose we revise our account of the goods included in educational distribution so that aesthetic appreciation, say, and the necessary understanding and virtue for conscientious citizenship count for just as much as job-related skills. An interesting implication of doing so is that the rationale for requiring equality under any just distribution becomes decreasingly clear. That is because job-related skills are positional whereas the other educational goods are not (Hollis 1982). If you and I both aspire to a career in business management for which we are equally qualified, any increase in your job-related skills is a corresponding disadvantage to me unless I can catch up. Positional goods have a competitive structure by definition, though the ends of civic or aesthetic education do not fit that structure. If you and I aspire to be good citizens and are equal in civic understanding and virtue, an advance in your civic education is no disadvantage to me. On the contrary, it is easier to be a good citizen the better other citizens learn to be. At the very least, so far as non-positional goods figure in our conception of what counts as a good education, the moral stakes of inequality are thereby lowered.

In fact, an emerging alternative to fair equality of opportunity is a principle that stipulates some benchmark of adequacy in achievement or opportunity as the relevant standard of distribution. But it is misleading to represent this as a contrast between egalitarian and sufficientarian conceptions. Philosophically serious interpretations of adequacy derive from the ideal of equal citizenship (Satz 2007; Anderson 2007). Then again, fair equality of opportunity in Rawls’s theory is derived from a more fundamental ideal of equality among citizens. This was arguably true in A Theory of Justice but it is certainly true in his later work (Dworkin 1977: 150–183; Rawls 1993). So, both Rawls’s principle and the emerging alternative share an egalitarian foundation. The debate between adherents of equal opportunity and those misnamed as sufficientarians is certainly not over (e.g., Brighouse & Swift 2009; Jacobs 2010; Warnick 2015). Further progress will likely hinge on explicating the most compelling conception of the egalitarian foundation from which distributive principles are to be inferred. Another Rawls-inspired alternative is that a “prioritarian” distribution of achievement or opportunity might turn out to be the best principle we can come up with—i.e., one that favors the interests of the least advantaged students (Schouten 2012).

The publication of Rawls’s Political Liberalism in 1993 signaled a decisive turning point in his thinking about justice. In his earlier book, the theory of justice had been presented as if it were universally valid. But Rawls had come to think that any theory of justice presented as such was open to reasonable rejection. A more circumspect approach to justification would seek grounds for justice as fairness in an overlapping consensus between the many reasonable values and doctrines that thrive in a democratic political culture. Rawls argued that such a culture is informed by a shared ideal of free and equal citizenship that provided a new, distinctively democratic framework for justifying a conception of justice. The shift to political liberalism involved little revision on Rawls’s part to the content of the principles he favored. But the salience it gave to questions about citizenship in the fabric of liberal political theory had important educational implications. How was the ideal of free and equal citizenship to be instantiated in education in a way that accommodated the range of reasonable values and doctrines encompassed in an overlapping consensus? Political Liberalism has inspired a range of answers to that question (cf. Callan 1997; Clayton 2006; Bull 2008).

Other philosophers besides Rawls in the 1990s took up a cluster of questions about civic education, and not always from a liberal perspective. Alasdair Macintyre’s After Virtue (1984) strongly influenced the development of communitarian political theory which, as its very name might suggest, argued that the cultivation of community could preempt many of the problems with conflicting individual rights at the core of liberalism. As a full-standing alternative to liberalism, communitarianism might have little to recommend it. But it was a spur for liberal philosophers to think about how communities could be built and sustained to support the more familiar projects of liberal politics (e.g., Strike 2010). Furthermore, its arguments often converged with those advanced by feminist exponents of the ethic of care (Noddings 1984; Gilligan 1982). Noddings’ work is particularly notable because she inferred a cogent and radical agenda for the reform of schools from her conception of care (Noddings 1992).

One persistent controversy in citizenship theory has been about whether patriotism is correctly deemed a virtue, given our obligations to those who are not our fellow citizens in an increasingly interdependent world and the sordid history of xenophobia with which modern nation states are associated. The controversy is partly about what we should teach in our schools and is commonly discussed by philosophers in that context (Galston 1991; Ben-Porath 2006; Callan 2006; Miller 2007; Curren & Dorn 2018). The controversy is related to a deeper and more pervasive question about how morally or intellectually taxing the best conception of our citizenship should be. The more taxing it is, the more constraining its derivative conception of civic education will be. Contemporary political philosophers offer divergent arguments about these matters. For example, Gutmann and Thompson claim that citizens of diverse democracies need to “understand the diverse ways of life of their fellow citizens” (Gutmann & Thompson 1996: 66). The need arises from the obligation of reciprocity which they (like Rawls) believe to be integral to citizenship. Because I must seek to cooperate with others politically on terms that make sense from their moral perspective as well as my own, I must be ready to enter that perspective imaginatively so as to grasp its distinctive content. Many such perspectives prosper in liberal democracies, and so the task of reciprocal understanding is necessarily onerous. Still, our actions qua deliberative citizen must be grounded in such reciprocity if political cooperation on terms acceptable to us as (diversely) morally motivated citizens is to be possible at all. This is tantamount to an imperative to think autonomously inside the role of citizen because I cannot close-mindedly resist critical consideration of moral views alien to my own without flouting my responsibilities as a deliberative citizen.

Civic education does not exhaust the domain of moral education, even though the more robust conceptions of equal citizenship have far-reaching implications for just relations in civil society and the family. The study of moral education has traditionally taken its bearings from normative ethics rather than political philosophy, and this is largely true of work undertaken in recent decades. The major development here has been the revival of virtue ethics as an alternative to the deontological and consequentialist theories that dominated discussion for much of the twentieth century.

The defining idea of virtue ethics is that our criterion of moral right and wrong must derive from a conception of how the ideally virtuous agent would distinguish between the two. Virtue ethics is thus an alternative to both consequentialism and deontology which locate the relevant criterion in producing good consequences or meeting the requirements of moral duty respectively. The debate about the comparative merits of these theories is not resolved, but from an educational perspective that may be less important than it has sometimes seemed to antagonists in the debate. To be sure, adjudicating between rival theories in normative ethics might shed light on how best to construe the process of moral education, and philosophical reflection on the process might help us to adjudicate between the theories. There has been extensive work on habituation and virtue, largely inspired by Aristotle (Burnyeat 1980; Peters 1981). But whether this does anything to establish the superiority of virtue ethics over its competitors is far from obvious. Other aspects of moral education—in particular, the paired processes of role-modelling and identification—deserve much more scrutiny than they have received (Audi 2017; Kristjánsson 2015, 2017).

Related to the issues concerning the aims and functions of education and schooling rehearsed above are those involving the specifically epistemic aims of education and attendant issues treated by social and virtue epistemologists. (The papers collected in Kotzee 2013 and Baehr 2016 highlight the current and growing interactions among social epistemologists, virtue epistemologists, and philosophers of education.)

There is, first, a lively debate concerning putative epistemic aims. Alvin Goldman argues that truth (or knowledge understood in the “weak” sense of true belief) is the fundamental epistemic aim of education (Goldman 1999). Others, including the majority of historically significant philosophers of education, hold that critical thinking or rationality and rational belief (or knowledge in the “strong” sense that includes justification) is the basic epistemic educational aim (Bailin & Siegel 2003; Scheffler 1965, 1973 [1989]; Siegel 1988, 1997, 2005, 2017). Catherine Z. Elgin (1999a,b) and Duncan Pritchard (2013, 2016; Carter & Pritchard 2017) have independently urged that understanding is the basic aim. Pritchard’s view combines understanding with intellectual virtue ; Jason Baehr (2011) systematically defends the fostering of the intellectual virtues as the fundamental epistemic aim of education. This cluster of views continues to engender ongoing discussion and debate. (Its complex literature is collected in Carter and Kotzee 2015, summarized in Siegel 2018, and helpfully analyzed in Watson 2016.)

A further controversy concerns the places of testimony and trust in the classroom: In what circumstances if any ought students to trust their teachers’ pronouncements, and why? Here the epistemology of education is informed by social epistemology, specifically the epistemology of testimony; the familiar reductionism/anti-reductionism controversy there is applicable to students and teachers. Anti-reductionists, who regard testimony as a basic source of justification, may with equanimity approve of students’ taking their teachers’ word at face value and believing what they say; reductionists may balk. Does teacher testimony itself constitute good reason for student belief?

The correct answer here seems clearly enough to be “it depends”. For very young children who have yet to acquire or develop the ability to subject teacher declarations to critical scrutiny, there seems to be little alternative to accepting what their teachers tell them. For older and more cognitively sophisticated students there seem to be more options: they can assess them for plausibility, compare them with other opinions, assess the teachers’ proffered reasons, subject them to independent evaluation, etc. Regarding “the teacher says that p ” as itself a good reason to believe it appears moreover to contravene the widely shared conviction that an important educational aim is helping students to become able to evaluate candidate beliefs for themselves and believe accordingly. That said, all sides agree that sometimes believers, including students, have good reasons simply to trust what others tell them. There is thus more work to do here by both social epistemologists and philosophers of education (for further discussion see Goldberg 2013; Siegel 2005, 2018).

A further cluster of questions, of long-standing interest to philosophers of education, concerns indoctrination : How if at all does it differ from legitimate teaching? Is it inevitable, and if so is it not always necessarily bad? First, what is it? As we saw earlier, extant analyses focus on the aims or intentions of the indoctrinator, the methods employed, or the content transmitted. If the indoctrination is successful, all have the result that students/victims either don’t, won’t, or can’t subject the indoctrinated material to proper epistemic evaluation. In this way it produces both belief that is evidentially unsupported or contravened and uncritical dispositions to believe. It might seem obvious that indoctrination, so understood, is educationally undesirable. But it equally seems that very young children, at least, have no alternative but to believe sans evidence; they have yet to acquire the dispositions to seek and evaluate evidence, or the abilities to recognize evidence or evaluate it. Thus we seem driven to the views that indoctrination is both unavoidable and yet bad and to be avoided. It is not obvious how this conundrum is best handled. One option is to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable indoctrination. Another is to distinguish between indoctrination (which is always bad) and non-indoctrinating belief inculcation, the latter being such that students are taught some things without reasons (the alphabet, the numbers, how to read and count, etc.), but in such a way that critical evaluation of all such material (and everything else) is prized and fostered (Siegel 1988: ch. 5). In the end the distinctions required by the two options might be extensionally equivalent (Siegel 2018).

Education, it is generally granted, fosters belief : in the typical propositional case, Smith teaches Jones that p , and if all goes well Jones learns it and comes to believe it. Education also has the task of fostering open-mindedness and an appreciation of our fallibility : All the theorists mentioned thus far, especially those in the critical thinking and intellectual virtue camps, urge their importance. But these two might seem at odds. If Jones (fully) believes that p , can she also be open-minded about it? Can she believe, for example, that earthquakes are caused by the movements of tectonic plates, while also believing that perhaps they aren’t? This cluster of italicized notions requires careful handling; it is helpfully discussed by Jonathan Adler (2002, 2003), who recommends regarding the latter two as meta-attitudes concerning one’s first-order beliefs rather than lessened degrees of belief or commitments to those beliefs.

Other traditional epistemological worries that impinge upon the epistemology of education concern (a) absolutism , pluralism and relativism with respect to knowledge, truth and justification as these relate to what is taught, (b) the character and status of group epistemologies and the prospects for understanding such epistemic goods “universalistically” in the face of “particularist” challenges, (c) the relation between “knowledge-how” and “knowledge-that” and their respective places in the curriculum, (d) concerns raised by multiculturalism and the inclusion/exclusion of marginalized perspectives in curriculum content and the classroom, and (e) further issues concerning teaching and learning. (There is more here than can be briefly summarized; for more references and systematic treatment cf. Bailin & Siegel 2003; Carter & Kotzee 2015; Cleverley & Phillips 1986; Robertson 2009; Siegel 2004, 2017; and Watson 2016.)

The educational research enterprise has been criticized for a century or more by politicians, policymakers, administrators, curriculum developers, teachers, philosophers of education, and by researchers themselves—but the criticisms have been contradictory. Charges of being “too ivory tower and theory-oriented” are found alongside “too focused on practice and too atheoretical”; but in light of the views of John Dewey and William James that the function of theory is to guide intelligent practice and problem-solving, it is becoming more fashionable to hold that the “theory v. practice” dichotomy is a false one. (For an illuminating account of the historical development of educational research and its tribulations, see Lagemann 2000.)

A similar trend can be discerned with respect to the long warfare between two rival groups of research methods—on one hand quantitative/statistical approaches to research, and on the other hand the qualitative/ethnographic family. (The choice of labels here is not entirely risk-free, for they have been contested; furthermore the first approach is quite often associated with “experimental” studies, and the latter with “case studies”, but this is an over-simplification.) For several decades these two rival methodological camps were treated by researchers and a few philosophers of education as being rival paradigms (Kuhn’s ideas, albeit in a very loose form, have been influential in the field of educational research), and the dispute between them was commonly referred to as “the paradigm wars”. In essence the issue at stake was epistemological: members of the quantitative/experimental camp believed that only their methods could lead to well-warranted knowledge claims, especially about the causal factors at play in educational phenomena, and on the whole they regarded qualitative methods as lacking in rigor; on the other hand the adherents of qualitative/ethnographic approaches held that the other camp was too “positivistic” and was operating with an inadequate view of causation in human affairs—one that ignored the role of motives and reasons, possession of relevant background knowledge, awareness of cultural norms, and the like. Few if any commentators in the “paradigm wars” suggested that there was anything prohibiting the use of both approaches in the one research program—provided that if both were used, they were used only sequentially or in parallel, for they were underwritten by different epistemologies and hence could not be blended together. But recently the trend has been towards rapprochement, towards the view that the two methodological families are, in fact, compatible and are not at all like paradigms in the Kuhnian sense(s) of the term; the melding of the two approaches is often called “mixed methods research”, and it is growing in popularity. (For more detailed discussion of these “wars” see Howe 2003 and Phillips 2009.)

The most lively contemporary debates about education research, however, were set in motion around the turn of the millennium when the US Federal Government moved in the direction of funding only rigorously scientific educational research—the kind that could establish causal factors which could then guide the development of practically effective policies. (It was held that such a causal knowledge base was available for medical decision-making.) The definition of “rigorously scientific”, however, was decided by politicians and not by the research community, and it was given in terms of the use of a specific research method—the net effect being that the only research projects to receive Federal funding were those that carried out randomized controlled experiments or field trials (RFTs). It has become common over the last decade to refer to the RFT as the “gold standard” methodology.

The National Research Council (NRC)—an arm of the US National Academies of Science—issued a report, influenced by postpostivistic philosophy of science (NRC 2002), that argued that this criterion was far too narrow. Numerous essays have appeared subsequently that point out how the “gold standard” account of scientific rigor distorts the history of science, how the complex nature of the relation between evidence and policy-making has been distorted and made to appear overly simple (for instance the role of value-judgments in linking empirical findings to policy directives is often overlooked), and qualitative researchers have insisted upon the scientific nature of their work. Nevertheless, and possibly because it tried to be balanced and supported the use of RFTs in some research contexts, the NRC report has been the subject of symposia in four journals, where it has been supported by a few and attacked from a variety of philosophical fronts: Its authors were positivists, they erroneously believed that educational inquiry could be value neutral and that it could ignore the ways in which the exercise of power constrains the research process, they misunderstood the nature of educational phenomena, and so on. This cluster of issues continues to be debated by educational researchers and by philosophers of education and of science, and often involves basic topics in philosophy of science: the constitution of warranting evidence, the nature of theories and of confirmation and explanation, etc. Nancy Cartwright’s important recent work on causation, evidence, and evidence-based policy adds layers of both philosophical sophistication and real world practical analysis to the central issues just discussed (Cartwright & Hardie 2012, Cartwright 2013; cf. Kvernbekk 2015 for an overview of the controversies regarding evidence in the education and philosophy of education literatures).

As stressed earlier, it is impossible to do justice to the whole field of philosophy of education in a single encyclopedia entry. Different countries around the world have their own intellectual traditions and their own ways of institutionalizing philosophy of education in the academic universe, and no discussion of any of this appears in the present essay. But even in the Anglo-American world there is such a diversity of approaches that any author attempting to produce a synoptic account will quickly run into the borders of his or her competence. Clearly this has happened in the present case.

Fortunately, in the last thirty years or so resources have become available that significantly alleviate these problems. There has been a flood of encyclopedia entries, both on the field as a whole and also on many specific topics not well-covered in the present essay (see, as a sample, Burbules 1994; Chambliss 1996b; Curren 1998, 2018; Phillips 1985, 2010; Siegel 2007; Smeyers 1994), two “Encyclopedias” (Chambliss 1996a; Phillips 2014), a “Guide” (Blake, Smeyers, Smith, & Standish 2003), a “Companion” (Curren 2003), two “Handbooks” (Siegel 2009; Bailey, Barrow, Carr, & McCarthy 2010), a comprehensive anthology (Curren 2007), a dictionary of key concepts in the field (Winch & Gingell 1999), and a good textbook or two (Carr 2003; Noddings 2015). In addition there are numerous volumes both of reprinted selections and of specially commissioned essays on specific topics, some of which were given short shrift here (for another sampling see A. Rorty 1998, Stone 1994), and several international journals, including Theory and Research in Education , Journal of Philosophy of Education , Educational Theory , Studies in Philosophy and Education , and Educational Philosophy and Theory . Thus there is more than enough material available to keep the interested reader busy.

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autonomy: personal | Dewey, John | feminist philosophy, interventions: ethics | feminist philosophy, interventions: liberal feminism | feminist philosophy, interventions: political philosophy | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on autonomy | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on disability | Foucault, Michel | Gadamer, Hans-Georg | liberalism | Locke, John | Lyotard, Jean François | -->ordinary language --> | Plato | postmodernism | Rawls, John | rights: of children | Rousseau, Jean Jacques

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The authors and editors would like to thank Randall Curren for sending a number of constructive suggestions for the Summer 2018 update of this entry.

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Psychological Impact on Education Research Paper

Introduction, psychological impact on education, psychological impact on professionals, psychological impacts on relationship success.

Education psychology entails the study of individual education based on scientific learning. The learning procedure, the study of success and cognition enable the scholars to comprehend personal differences in self-concept, mental power, personality, and performance. In fact, the educational psychology field deeply depends on training, evaluation, assessment, and testing in order to improve the procedures of learning as well as educational practices.

This aspect may comprise of learning the instructional practices that fall in the education environment. Over the past two decades, the educational psychology as a profession has experienced prompt development and growth. Education psychology has also generated objectively novel occupation founded on concepts and trainings of psychologist along with diverse professions.

From the above assertions, the students’ relationship and academic success is determined by their teachers. In fact, the lives of children are impacted by the presence of their teachers from the day they commence education until that time when the leave.

While considering the potential lesson plan designs, the means of lessening awkward behaviors and methodologies of teaching, the professionals prepare for the lessons after and before school in order to maintain effectiveness. In essence, psychology has diverse effects on education, teachers as well as the relationship success of students in a learning milieu. Therefore, this research examines the impacts of psychology on education, professionals, and relationship success in the education setting.

The educational psychology in accordance to the academic description may mean the study of teaching, learning, and learners. Nevertheless, it entails more according to students yearning to be educators in the future. Psychology is the mounted theory, wisdom, and knowledge that all the instructors ought to possess in order to resolve the day to day teaching problems.

Teachers can never be guided on what task to perform by the educational psychology. Nonetheless, it might provide the teachers with the required guidelines that are employed in generating a better language and decision (Love, 2009). In turn, this would enable the teachers to converse the thinking and experiences they encounter in the education sector.

Education requires a good teacher in order to create a healthy learning environment. Different scholars assert that a good teacher may be witty, kind, and possess the capability in taking care of the students. Others argue that a good teacher must have proper self-discipline, hardworking, and planning skills. In the contemporary world, the best educator may have better communication capabilities, possess infectious love for education, be enthusiast, and have good leadership characters.

A number of scholars agree that such qualities and competencies result in good teaching besides transforming the learning environment. Such qualities may not be sufficient without knowledge as a significant aspect. Knowledge enables teachers to be effective in communicating the available information to the learners (Love, 2009). The pedagogical relationship amid the teacher’s requirement and the learner is important. However, efficient instruction involves one character relaying the knowledge he/she possesses to the others.

Conversely, teachers are expected to assess prior students’ knowledge, administer the classroom, evaluate the outcomes of education, and motivate all learners. Educators are also expected to evaluate the information required during education, take charge of the students’ characteristics, and effectively communicate ideas to students.

Many researchers believe that good teaching strategies can be achieved through training. Nonetheless, it is apparent that good education needs to be practiced and observed with different guidelines on better teaching (Love, 2009). Thus, the main aspects of successful teaching are communicating and educating skills, apprentice learning and awareness, problem resolving and rational skills, as well as info on teaching and topic sources.

It becomes appropriate to integrate psychology and education. The delineation of education psychology enables different people to apply the models of psychology in learning the procedure of education. The psychological knowledge helps both the teachers and students to apply what they have acquired in the classroom for a better understanding. In general, psychology determines the manner in which students learn, how professionals administer the classrooms, cognitive functioning of students, and learners influence based on culture and environment. It also determines the way such aspects relate to teaching and teachers (Farrell, 2010).

The present day teachers remain good via experience, study, and hard work. The success of any educator relies on the instantaneous state of affairs. Thus, successful teaching is contextual. Effective instructors must be innovative and curious in order to aspire for better means of teaching. A single characteristic (intentionality) appears to be the characteristic of exceptional educators.

Intentionality refers to performing certain tasks for a purpose or reason. The intentional educators are those that always think over the results that they aspire to achieve from the learners (Kenneth & Eller, 2012). Such teachers think of how every decision made enables the students to move towards the anticipated results.

An intentional instructor understands that maximum education do not take place by chance. At times, students study in unexpected ways with a good number learning from a more disorganized class. Therefore in order to change the situation, teachers must be flexible, thoughtful, and purposeful. Educators should not at any point lose sight of any set objectives and goals for each learner. They simply ought to be intentional. Intentionality enables them to confront students with the aim of achieving excellent efforts (Love, 2009).

Equally, intentionality helps teachers in generating theoretical leaps besides retaining and systematizing fresh knowledge for learners. Teachers continuously solicit the success of objectives set in an educational setting. Psychology enables teachers to examine if every portion of the available information is relevant to the needs, skills, and background knowledge of the student. Intentionality helps the educator to ascertain that every assignment or practice is visibly associated to the anticipated result and that every hour of education is utilized healthily and prudently.

The research findings postulate that the main predictor of an educator’s impact on learners is the conviction that the teacher’s actions make a huge difference to the success of students. The idea known as the efficacy of teachers is at the core of referring an educator as intentional. Different believes make teachers differ in a number of ways. Any intentional instructor with strong faith in personal efficacy tends to present reliable effort in order to encounter the barriers and keeps pushing for the success of his/her students.

On the contrary, other intentional educator attains efficacy through continual appraisal of the outcomes of instruction and continuous push for fresh policies in place of instruction failure. Such instructors frequently search for ideas in resources such as workshops, magazines, books, and colleagues in order to strengthen and boost the skills of teaching (Farrell, 2010).

Civilizing the learners’ rapports with educators has long term, positive, and significant impacts on the social and academic growth of children. In fact, the improvement of teacher-student association does not create add-ons in success. Nonetheless, learners with supportive, positive, and close rapport with instructors achieve elevated levels of success compared to students having divergent affiliation. Sometimes a learner experiences individual association with his/her instructor, acknowledges the recurrent communication, and accepts extra praise and guidance.

However, this appears to be in contrast to the condemnation received from the trainer. As a result, such a learner possibly develops trust; displays commitment to studies, exhibits improved classroom performance, and accomplishes superior academic levels (Kenneth & Eller, 2012). An optimistic student-teacher affiliation draws learners into the procedure of studying besides encouraging the hunger developed after learning.

A better relationship between the student and the teacher matters a lot. The instructors who promote affirmative associations with the learners generate favorable learning settings and gather the apprentices’ needs in academics, emotions, and growth. Hence, an optimistic rapport is purposeful as it holds up the learners’ educational changes, contributes to communication ability, encourages success academically, and boosts learners’ resiliency in learning achievement (Kenneth & Eller, 2012).

Education psychology has engendered new-fangled occupation based on theories and practices of psychologists and diverse professions. Psychology has diverse effects on education, teachers and the relationship success of students in an education environment. Psychology determines the manner in which students learn, how teachers control the classrooms, cognitive functioning of students, and learners influence based on culture and environment.

It also determines the way in which different aspects relate to teaching and teachers. Regardless of the myth that certain people possess inborn qualities of teaching, educational psychology has relayed efficient and good teaching skills. The improvement of learners’ rapports with educators has long term, positive, and significant impacts on the social and academic growth of children. Hence, psychology plays an important role in education, professionals and relationship success.

Farrell, P. (2010). School psychology: Learning lessons from history and moving forward . School Psychology International, 31 (6), 581-598.

Kenneth, H., & Eller, B. (2012). Educational psychology and the learning environment. Educational Psychology for Effective Learning, (3) 1, 1-38.

Love, P. (2009). Educational psychologists: The early search for an identity. Educational Psychology in Practice, 25 (1), 3-8.

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Psychology and its impact on education in india.

• Farida Abdulla Khan Farida Abdulla Khan Jamia Millia Islamia
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.013.116
• Published online: 26 April 2021

Educational studies in India has its roots in teacher training, beginning with an apprenticeship model for primary school teachers in the 19th century. It was subsequently formally instituted in “normal” schools, then colleges, and finally as departments of teacher education in universities by the mid-20th century. In moving beyond school-level subject competence and school-based practical skills, the intellectual and academic foundations and the professional character of teacher education were sought to be strengthened by adding a disciplinary component of the “foundational” disciplines of history, philosophy, sociology, and psychology of education. Of these, psychology, as the then-emerging science of human behavior, with a growing corpus of scientific research, was most easily able to integrate into the programs and to contribute applicable academic and research inputs into the professional content.

Serious engagement with the more socially and critically oriented foundational disciplines was more difficult, and although they formed part of the teacher education (TE) curriculum, their integration with the programs remained superficial. When a more comprehensive field of study to explore the landscape of education beyond teacher education began to be imagined, the established departments of education and the educational community were reluctant to create a parallel field of study in education. Given their long association with and commitment to teacher education and its eclectic character, the departments were keen on retaining the TE framework and directing all study of education through this lens. The established and familiar empiricist and positivist model of psychology that had been adopted by teacher education was therefore to seriously influence the development of the new discipline, with long-term consequences for its teaching and research.

• education as discipline
• educational psychology
• teacher education
• disciplines of education
• development of education
• education within universities,

Introduction

The trajectory of education is somewhat unique in that, unlike most disciplines, its entry into the university system was not as a well-formulated academic discipline. Departments of education were established as centers for the professional training of school teachers that evolved initially out of an apprenticeship model in schools. Subsequently, the training was moved into the “normal” school 1 and later into colleges affiliated to the university. In India the need for formal training arose in the context of a mass education system established by the colonial regime for its Indian subjects after the mid- 19th century . “Education” as a discipline or a field of studies, in the early 20th century (when the recommendation for teacher training institutions to be located in universities was first made) and well into the 1950s (when an independent India was beginning to review the education system within the framework of its constitution), was only an idea in the process of being imagined, conceptualized, and demarcated. The departments of education thus needed to establish their status and to compete with the many prestigious disciplines along with their long and established intellectual antecedents in the sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences.

The training initially consisted of instruction in school subjects, but as it was formalized and institutionalized as teacher education ( TE), a general component of theory relating to principles of teaching-learning and classroom management was introduced in the course of the late 19th and early 20th centuries . Although a common history and the associated dynamics of education as a constantly contested domain (whether as discipline or sub-discipline) has had many similarities across countries, its evolution, conceptualization, and nature have varied depending on the academic, intellectual, and social contexts of its location. In India, education sought to rely on its professional status of teacher training and to accept a sub-disciplinary status, although it has been argued that it could have chosen a different route. 2 Education departments across the country (with rare exceptions) have steadfastly retained the TE component as the core and the vantage point for addressing educational concerns. Although it is now a recognized field of studies in higher education, its identity remains diffuse and highly contested. 3 Tracing the history of the discipline is invariably tied up with the trajectory of teacher education, the commitment to a “professional” identity, and its relationship with what came to be designated as “foundational” disciplines.

This article reviews the long evolution of TE, its move to the university, and the development of a disciplinary field of education. The evidence presented here suggests that the TE route to creating a discipline imposed specific constraints that have shaped the trajectory of the field in very particular ways and have allowed a positivist and atheoretical version of psychology (within a narrow terrain of school and classroom) to mold its academic aspects, shape its research, and direct it toward an empiricist perspective.

“ The Genesis of a Discipline: Teacher Education in British India ” is an analysis of official documents (commissions, reports, policies, resolutions) for an understanding of the early history of teacher training, its genesis, and conceptualization. The first part, “ Curricula and Courses ” covers the colonial period from around the mid- 19th century until 1947 , when the present modern system of education along Western lines was introduced and established in India. It also provides a very brief account of a few important institutions and their courses of study.

The second part of this section, “ Education, Teacher Education, and the Imperatives of Nation Building: 1947 and Beyond ” takes this analysis forward and covers the post-independence period, when TE assumed a marked significance in the project of nation building. This period was crucial for laying the foundations of the discipline and creating structures that shaped the course of educational studies from the 1940s up to the end of the 20th century .

“ Education and the University: The CIE, Teacher Education, and the Discipline of Education ” expands the analysis to include data from other sources by focusing on the establishment and growth of the Central Institute of Education (CIE) to understand how TE, and its close association with psychology, has shaped the discipline of education in India.

“ The Disciplines in Education and the Turn to Psychology ” explores the model of psychology that was integrated into teacher education and how this model, directly or indirectly, has influenced TE and subsequently the discipline of education. Adopting this model of psychology enabled TE to pay less attention to the other foundational disciplines and to slot them as too theoretical, thereby missing out on a serious engagement with a social and a critical perspective on education. Because of its close connection with TE when education began to develop and expand, it was shaped and influenced more directly by psychology because the alternative perspectives offered by the other foundational disciplines had already been rendered less accessible. 4

The Genesis of a Discipline: Teacher Education in British India

The formal and modern system of school education in India was established under the British colonial regime during the 19th and early 20th centuries . Early efforts were sporadic and came from a variety of sources—the church and missionaries, British officials of the Company, and interested individuals, as well as the initiatives of the administrative establishment. With the Charter Act of 1813 , the East India Company formally assumed this responsibility by allocating funds for the education of the local population. The Wood’s Despatch of 1854 prescribed an educational policy for India, and although Indians had little say in either the policy or its implementation, the broad structures that evolved out of it served to define the educational system through the period of British rule. In 1858 , when the colonized territories came directly under the British Crown, there was an increase in both investment and interest in education.

The new system of education, a modern curriculum and the teaching of English, demanded a different set of capabilities from the teachers, as the existing system was operating through vernacular languages and a traditional curriculum. The monitorial system of training teachers continued, gradually leading to the establishment of normal schools that were initially private initiatives but later established by the government, which, after 1857 , became seriously involved in the education of the local population and paid more attention to the training of teachers.

Through this period, important commissions were constituted to review the educational system and to recommend reform and change where needed. The documents discussed here are the Education Commission of 1882 ; the Resolution of the Governor General of 1904 , the Government of India Resolution of 1913 , the University Commission of 1917 , and the Sadler Commission of 1942 . The documents are a rich source of information for understanding the state of teachers and their training and the perceived requirements at each juncture, often contextualized in the prevailing discussions about TE in India and in the West.

The Indian Education Commission (also known as the Hunter Commission) that presented its report in 1882 (Government of India [GoI], 1883 ) undertook a detailed review of all major aspects of education and covered all presidencies and provinces administered by the colonial government, in addition to gathering information from other parts of the subcontinent. It presents a comprehensive picture of the existing educational system and flags some important discussions on teacher training.

The report suggests that teaching, especially at the primary levels, did not attract those who had already acquired a good school education—whether this was because of the status, the remuneration, or advancement prospects. It records a total of 106 teacher training institutions for primary school teachers, with variation in the quality, duration, and courses, and describes the normal school as serving

a two-fold purpose, it teaches subjects and it teaches the best way of teaching them. The teaching of subjects can be sufficiently provided for in ordinary places of instruction if their standard is high enough for it, what specially characterizes a good normal school is instruction in the science and practice in the art of teaching. (GoI, 1883 , p. 235)

The normal schools were initially established for the training of primary school teachers, and a large part of the training was to provide a secondary-level subject knowledge. When normal schools began to train secondary school teachers, the professional aspects of the training began to be considered more seriously, and because a basic qualification of secondary schooling already provided them with adequate subject knowledge, the need for a more substantial component of academic content for professional development became obvious.

These concerns were further elaborated in the resolution of 1904 as follows:

The equipment of a Training College for secondary teachers is at least as important as the equipment of an Arts College, and the work calls for an exercise of abilities as great as those required in any branch of Educational Service. The period of training for students must be at least two years, except in the case of graduates, for whom one year’s training may suffice. For the graduates the course of instruction will be chiefly directed towards imparting to them a knowledge of the principles which underlie the art of teaching, and some degree of technical skill in the practice of the art. . . . For the others, the course should embrace the extension, consolidation, and revision of their general studies; but the main object should be to render them capable teachers, and no attempt should be made to prepare them for any higher external examination. (GoI, 1904 , p. 44)

It is clear that the need for the certification of teachers had been gaining ground, and this would require some standardization and reflection on the quality of training. The 1913 Government of India resolution goes on to suggest:

Few reforms are more urgently needed than the extension and improvement of the training of teachers, for both primary and secondary schools in all subjects including, in the case of the latter schools, science and oriental studies. The object must steadily be kept in view that eventually under modern systems of education no teacher should be able to teach without a certificate that he is qualified to do so. (GoI, 1913 , pp. 37–38)

The suggestion that universities intervene to improve standards of education was first made by the Calcutta University Commission in 1917 , with the recommendation that departments of education be established in Calcutta and in Dhaka (the two universities within its ambit).

The aim of these departments would be to promote the systematic and practical study of the science and art of education; to provide increased opportunities for the professional training of teachers; and to arouse among the students a deeper interest in the work of the teaching profession and in the opportunities which it offers for public service. (Government of India, 1919 , p. 72).

Further, it would enable students to interact within a university milieu and to come into contact with students of psychology, economics, and history, and various branches of science including medicine. The report recognizes that

the study of education is stimulated and guided by many converging influences which bear upon the different aspects of this many sided subject, suggest new lines of inquiry, indicate methods of scientific investigation and criticize any tendency to rely upon ill-founded assumptions or to adopt hurried generalizations. (Government of India, 1919 , p. 73)

The report refers to developments and debates around educational thought and practice in the West and recommends incorporating the psychology of learning into the training.

The last important document with suggestions for teacher education before independence, the Sargent Report of 1944 makes the observation that teacher training institutions are “utterly insufficient” and “the type of training which these institutions give is often open to serious criticism. It fails to keep pace with modern ideas in education and there is insufficient coordination between theory and practice” (Central Advisory Board of Education, 1947 , p. 48).

These documents confirm that well into the 1940s, teacher education is still a discipline in the making, and there are widespread concerns about the adequacy and the quality of the programs. There is a sustained call for upgrading the education of teachers and for more substantive academic inputs by introducing research and theory, but there is little indication of a serious effort at examining how this would emerge.

Curricula and Courses

Curricular documents of this period are difficult to trace, but all sources confirm that the TE courses included a general education component and a professional component. The former consisted of the range of school subjects from the humanities, sciences, and social sciences, with an effort to overcome any lacunae in school education depending on the basic qualifications of the student teachers. With the induction of better-qualified students, the importance of a “professional” component became evident, making way for a more substantive academic component in addition to the practice-oriented teaching skills. A general “principles of teaching” course with inputs from psychology appears in the syllabus by the late 1800s, along with recommendations for including history, philosophy, and subsequently sociology of education. Enhancing the teachers’ capacity to contribute to the overall development of children also led to more “co-curricular” courses like sports and physical education, art, music, and so on.

In the Madras Normal School, reorganized as a teachers’ college in 1886 , courses such as “Psychology in Its Relation to Education,” “The Scientific Basis of Education” and “General History of Education in Europe” were introduced. Courses on classroom management and school administration were also beginning to appear along with several new courses to enrich the professional aspects of school education. 5 Courses on teaching theory, method, and school management were common by the early 20th century , and in 1917 the principal of the David Hare College in Calcutta was complaining that the psychology of the child was being superseded by experimental psychology (GOI, 1919 ).

The first bachelor’s in education (BEd) degree was instituted in Andhra in 1932 and a master’s in education (MEd), with a research component was introduced in 1936 in Bombay. In 1937 , official recommendations for teachers to have a basic familiarity with sociology, psychology, history, and ethics were being made:

Young teachers should know something of the history of their own country, and its educational efforts should make some attempt to grasp the social problems of the local communities which they will serve and should be encouraged to understand the nature and needs of young children as well as the techniques of instructing them. (Quoted by Devi, 1968 )

The training thus consisted of imparting knowledge of school subjects initially in an apprenticeship mode and later in special institutions. Gradually, however, with the requirement of certification and professionalization, lacunae began to be identified and course content began to expand. The role of the teacher was acquiring more importance and training solely within the confines of the school was seen as too narrow and limiting. By the late 19th and early 20th centuries , the need for teachers to experience the liberal and intellectual environment of the university was recognized and recommendations for upgrading teaching skills and knowledge levels were made. There is little evidence, however, of any serious deliberation or action on the repeated suggestions for education departments to move beyond teacher education and to create a more comprehensive field for the study of education.

Education, Teacher Education, and the Imperatives of Nation Building: 1947 and Beyond

Education figured prominently in the rhetoric of national development and departments of education gained a new status and prominence in higher education as part of this project after India became independent in 1947 . The country decided to adopt a model of centralized planning, and a developmental trajectory was put in place through the 5-year plans. Education was to play a major role in the modernizing project—in matters economic as well as social—but most importantly, at this juncture, in the creation of a cohesive nation and a modern and prosperous nation-state. Universal primary education was a commitment made in the new constitution, but attention and resources in the early years after independence were directed to higher education, especially in the areas of science and technology.

The ideals of equality and social justice through schooling, so prominent in the national rhetoric, were not followed up with the necessary political and financial commitment, and intentionally or unintentionally, the “good” teacher was projected as the repository for affecting the tremendous social change that education was expected to bring about. The commitment to providing schooling for the masses was sought to be achieved by expanding the elementary school system alongside a concomitant urgency for more trained teachers, and although there was some effort to incorporate Gandhi’s system of basic education, 6 it was never seriously pursued. TE institutions assumed importance in the effort to educate a large and near illiterate population across a vast and varied landscape and a complex and oppressively unequal social order. Had these departments been better prepared academically and intellectually, this context could have been fertile ground and inspiration for a program of research and theory building, but in the absence of such an orientation, the expansion took a more practical and functional route. The documents discussed here, beginning with the University Commission of 1949 and culminating with the National Policy on Education (NPE), 1986 , provide an overview of the educational system and its shortcomings, along with the vision of education that was sought to be adopted.

The University Commission, set up under the chairmanship of Dr. S. Radhakrishnan (philosopher, eminent educationist, and later president of India), presented a comprehensive review of the higher education sector in its report in 1949 , as well as a vision for education with reference to the new constitution and recommendations for every aspect of higher education. It set high standards for universities and expected them

to provide leadership in politics and administration, the professions, industry and commerce. They have to meet the increasing demand for every type of higher education, literary and scientific, technical and professional. They must enable the country to attain, in as short a time as possible, freedom from want, disease and ignorance, by the application and development of scientific and technical knowledge. India is rich in natural resources and her people have intelligence and energy and are throbbing with renewed vigour. It is for the universities to create knowledge and train minds who would bring together the two, material resources and human energies. (GoI, 1949 , p. 6)

The report discusses education in the section on “Professional Education” rather than in “Arts and Sciences” and highlights a dilemma that has long plagued education:

Education as a study at university level is peculiar in this respect, that in whichever direction it is studied to an advanced level, the study tends to become something other than Education e.g. it turns into a study of Philosophy or Psychology or History or Sociology. Education is an essential focal point for the various studies and skills necessary for the tending teachers. (GOI, 1949 , p. 184)

Although it refers to the need for research in education and recognizes that “the problems confronting Indian education today are so stupendous in their sheer scale and so complicated in their nature, that the efforts of even the most gifted and persistent individual seem dwarfish in comparison” (GOI, 1949 , p. 188), it goes on to elaborate only practice-oriented courses and asks for all theory to be directly related to school teaching and teacher education. Surprisingly, for a document that sets high standards of intellectualization for university education, it insists on grounding the discipline of education in the practice of teaching with a focus on problem-solving.

The Secondary Education Commission, 1952 (also known as the Mudaliar Commission), was constituted with the mandate “to examine the prevailing system of secondary education in the country and suggest measures for its reorganization and improvement” (GOI, 1954 ). It was heavily influenced by the University Commission, 1949 , and within that vision it became the blueprint for the development of TE for several decades.

In sections devoted to “The Teacher” and “Teacher Education,” the importance of teachers is reiterated in the hyperbolic language reserved for the profession: “We are however convinced that the most important factor in the contemplated educational reconstruction is the teacher—his personal qualities, his educational qualifications, his professional training and the place he occupies in the school as well as the community” (GoI, 1954 , p. 163). Nevertheless, it does recognize more realistically the status of teachers and their woefully inadequate service conditions: “We were painfully impressed by the fact that the social status, the salary and the general service conditions of teachers are far from satisfactory” (pp. 163–164). The Mudaliar Commission concludes by stating, “When service conditions and emoluments are unattractive and status of teachers remains low and unimportant compared with other learned professions, there is no possibility of drawing large numbers of really qualified, enthusiastic and devoted candidates to join the profession” (p. 179).

The Commission’s recommendations had a major impact on TE programs and institutions, with consequences for the development of the discipline. It made very specific recommendations for curricular and co-curricular activities, qualifications, and other activities within the programs, and emphasized the need for a research component. It makes several recommendations for the master’s program for TE that are especially relevant to this discussion and suggests that the MEd should carry out research on comparative methods and new methods of teaching and should allow students to specialize in curricula, craft-centered education and co-curricular education. It also recommends that the MEd train teachers for higher grade posts like headmaster, inspector, and teaching staff of training institutions. Most importantly, the condition that postgraduation be limited to students with a first degree in TE and a minimum of 3 years’ teaching experience has had serious implications for the growth of the discipline.

Finally, in 1964 an Education Commission (the Kothari Commission) was constituted to review the entire system of schooling in order to suggest a course of school education for the entire country. The Kothari Commission Report 1964–1966 (Education Commission, 1966 ) is an extremely important and relevant document as a frame of reference for innovations, debates, and discussions around education to this date. The chapter on teacher education comments on education as a discipline and makes a number of suggestions in this regard. It calls for breaking the isolation of departments of education from the life of the university and to think of it as more than just pedagogy. Recognizing that in several countries education has developed “considerably as a social science and a separate academic discipline” (p. 68), it recommends recognizing “education” as a social science or as a separate discipline to be introduced as an elective subject at the undergraduate and postgraduate stages with an orientation to sociological, philosophical, and psychological foundations of education. The policy that followed the Education Commission did not reflect its egalitarian goals, and its recommendations for a greater awareness of inequalities and social justice were blatantly ignored in what Velaskar ( 2010 , pp. 65–66) refers to as a “rapid retreat from socialist goals” of the post-Nehruvian period, describing the policy statement as “an incredibly weak reflection of the ECs egalitarian perspective” that was openly criticized by the member secretary of the EC himself. The suggestion for a serious critique of education through a social science perspective, to be undertaken by strengthening the development of a separate discipline, found no mention in the policy and not much favor in the prominent departments of teacher education across the country.

Finally, a major comprehensive policy on school education, the National Policy on Education (NPE), ( 1986 ), with revisions made in 1992 ), came into effect, with substantive changes to school education. It is the national framework within which school education in India functions, A new education policy although there was a serious restructuring of the system following the new education policy of 2019 , which is not discussed here. The NPE 1986 claimed to have been framed on the basis of the Kothari Commission, but it made an important ideological shift that India was to effect in the context of global capitalism and neoliberal politics of the 1980s that became more evident in the 1990s. 7 A section on the teacher discusses teacher education but does not have much to say about education as discipline.

A National Commission on Teachers was appointed in 1983 that examined the relationship between the school and society and the teacher’s role in some detail. Subtitled “The Teacher and Society,” it emphasizes “essential similarities of educational and teacher related issues” and the teacher’s role in building a humane and caring society (National commission on Teachers, 1985 ). In its observations on teacher education and the status, working conditions, and remuneration of teachers, it highlighted the inadequacy of the financial allocation for education in the 5-year plans and the steep drop from the first plan ( 1951 ), which had a 7.2% of the total outlay, to 2.6% by the time of the sixth plan in 1980 .

The teacher is expected to

acquire the basic skills and competencies of a good teacher: the capacity to manage a class with students of varying abilities: to communicate ideas logically and with clarity; to use technology for effective teaching; to organize educative experiences outside the class to work with the community and to help students do so. Further the teacher should also translate national goals into educational actions; communicate the feelings of national unity and integrity and also an understanding and appreciation of global issues like population explosion, environmental pollution, the threat of a nuclear holocaust and the quest for world peace; . . . to imbibe right attitudes and values besides being proficient in skills related to teaching. (National Commission on Teachers, 1985 , p. 82)

To sum up, in post-independence India, preference was given to higher education, especially in the sciences and technology, and although the lofty ideals of the Indian Constitution in relation to school education were often invoked, there was little financial or political commitment for these. There is an inherent belief in education as an instrument of social and economic change and progress, but despite the rhetoric, there is little deliberation or serious consideration of how theory and research within a social science perspective would emerge from a professional program, immersed in practice alone. The Kothari Commission’s recommendations to develop such a discipline did not translate into policy, and the responsibility for this complex task was projected on the training of “ideal” teachers within the confines of the classroom, the school, and the teaching-learning process that only served to deflect from the responsibility of the state and its political and economic structures and policies.

Education and the University: The CIE, Teacher Education, and the Discipline of Education

Having briefly surveyed the history, vision, and conceptualization of teacher education in the process of creating a discipline of education, this section explores the practice and the implementation of the vision in the context of the national concerns after independence. It describes and explores the development and the functioning of the Central Institute of Education (CIE) of the University of Delhi, from the moment of its establishment following the country’s independence in 1947 , to the last decades of the 20th century , the period in which the broad framework of educational studies was institutionalized, the structures and processes formalized, and its contours more or less defined. The CIE is a fair exemplar of a typical department of education that continues to maintain its status as a “model” institution for TE and ranks among the leading education departments in the country.

The CIE was the first “national” institute of education in independent India, set up in 1947 in the University of Delhi, and supported and inspired by important national leaders, although it was only one among many in the long line of TE institutions. The Government Normal School at Madras had been affiliated to the University with the status of a college as early as 1886 , and by 1932 , of the existing 18 universities, 13 had set up faculties of education. In the history of education in independent India, however, the CIE ranks as a leading institution, created to serve as a model for the new departments of education and for teacher education and educational studies throughout the country. Although it was initially under the administrative control of the Ministry of Education, and later the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT), it was fully integrated into the University of Delhi as the Department of Education in 1979 .

The mandate handed to the CIE by those who were planning and imagining the new India establishes its importance and the expectations invested in it. Maulana Azad, the first Education Minister of independent India, at the inauguration of the CIE in 1947 , announced:

The teachers trained at this Institute will naturally be employed in the Centrally Administered Areas. . . . The function of the Institute is something greater than this. It will turn out teachers who will be ‘model teachers’ for provinces, but over and above all this, this Institute will be a research centre for solving new educational problems of the country and will be a beacon light for the training institutions of the country. The problems facing the Institute will be, how to correlate the different systems of basic education, how to reform the present system of examinations, and how to mould the primary education of a child so that he is given full opportunity to develop his individuality and also to equip himself to keep abreast of world affairs. This and similar other problems will come before the Institute and it will have to find ways and means of solving them. (Kumar, 1991 , pp. 95-96)

The prestigious Radhakrishnan Commission in 1949 reiterates the central role of the CIE:

The problems confronting Indian Education today are so stupendous in their sheer scale and so complicated in their nature that the efforts of even the most gifted and persistent individuals seem dwarfish in comparison. In these circumstances immense responsibility lies upon the Central Institute of Education and its progress must be keenly watched and keenly supported by every well-wisher of India. (GOI, 1949 , p. 188)

Education as progress was critical to the vision of the nation, and in the many proposals for restructuring the educational system that would nurture responsible citizens, TE drew attention and gained immense importance. The CIE assumed the role of a model institution in this context, and along with other important Departments of Education in the country, it has played a prominent part in shaping the course of the discipline, with TE at its core. Although postgraduate and doctoral programs in education had been initiated during the colonial period, a serious field of educational studies had failed to emerge, and the CIE was an important step in this direction. A close look at the way in which the institution evolved in setting its goals, formulated courses, established curricula, and created structures of teacher appointments and student qualifications offers further insights into the genesis of the discipline and the direction that it has taken.

The account presented here uses some documentation but is largely derived from my interaction and interviews with former students and retired and present faculty of the CIE, some of whom were part of its formative years. The bulk of information here comes from my interaction with Professor R. N. Mehrotra, with inputs from other faculty, past and present. Prof. Mehrotra joined CIE as a BEd student in 1955 , after having completed an MA in mathematics, and was subsequently appointed to the CIE faculty in 1956 . 8 He was closely involved with the institute and its development during his long teaching career until 1988 , and subsequently in his continued involvement with the Institute as a valued former faculty member. He remembered his association with the CIE with immense professional pride and warmth, and captured the ethos and the atmosphere of the institution with insight and clarity. He was able to provide valuable insights into the ethos of its formative years, along with a vivid picture of it’s academic, social, and cultural life . According to him, “The story of the CIE is, in a way, the story of educational studies and, particularly, the story of teacher education in India since 1947.” 9

At the time of independence, TE institutions, whether as colleges or departments, had been functioning more as affiliated institutions, rather than regular departments of the universities, with a focus on what was seen as a not very high status professional course and barely recognized by the academic community. The mission of preparing teachers to go out into schools and to be part of educating a vast, illiterate population as participants in a major social and economic transformation of the country, at the time of independence, endowed a new status to the established expertise within the field. The bachelor’s in education (BEd), a 1-year degree for secondary school teachers, following 3 years of undergraduate studies, assumed the responsibility of fulfilling this mission and became the source from which the new department would draw its identity, self-esteem, and prestige.

The BEd became the flagship program and the primary commitment of the CIE, and although the MEd and PhD programs had also been introduced, they received much less attention. In the 1960s, the Planning Commission 10 recommended setting up a national institute for research in education, and the CIE was offered this responsibility with the condition that it would discontinue its teacher education program. Having devoted its energy and planning to building up its teacher education capacities, it declined the offer, and the NCERT was created for this purpose. The decision not to transform itself into a solely research institute for education was an important and considered one, and was to define the character of education for decades to come, with teacher education as the central focus and theory and research as secondary aspects of it.

The following account by Prof. Mehrotra furnishes a rich portrait of the institute and highlights the prominent position of the BEd program, its applied aspects, and the extent of commitment required by both faculty and students.

The academic life was BEd dominated, the MEd, MPhil, and PhD students normally were less involved. They often felt neglected. The CIE was an institution where students received individual attention. Besides closer contact with methods teachers, 11 we all had a tutorial system. A tutorial group of seven to eight students met once a week and discussed some topic decided in the previous week’s meeting. A practice teaching group was also seven to eight students in a school with a supervisor who was not necessarily a teacher of any of the two subjects offered by the student. Towards the end of the practice teaching, there was rotation for some days—the supervisors going to different schools. Thus, it would happen that one’s subject method’s teacher visited his students once or twice in the session. The BEd course (a 1,000-marks examination) was divided into 500 marks theory and 500 marks practical. The theory had five papers of 100 marks each; 25% internal assessment based on monthly and half-yearly examinations, and 75% marks final external examination for each paper, conducted by the University Examination Section. The 500-marks practical examination was entirely internal—250 marks for practice teaching and 250 divided into five different assignments—50 for five tutorial essays; 50 for audiovisual aids—models, charts, etc.; 50 divided into five activities—co-curricular, sports, literary, etc.; 50 for five assignments—scrap book, framing of two question papers in the school and practical work in psychology—intelligence tests, personality tests, etc. (There was a psychology practical class once a week with eight or 10 students in a group.) The BEd. students were engaged in many co-curricular activities—a students’ union called Panchayat whose office bearers—president, vice-president, secretary, joint secretary, treasurer, were elected by the students in the beginning of each session. Before the elections, even immediately after the session started there was a 2-day orientation camp conducted by the principal and two senior teachers. There were performances through the year, with programs of music, acting, speeches, etc., by students. This was organized by the Panchayat adviser, who was the authority in charge of the Panchayat and its activities. 12

With a newfound legitimization in the agenda of nation-building and a vision of education outlined by the state, the picture that emerges is of an institution deeply committed to the task of creating teachers who were expected to know their disciplines, contribute to an all-round development of their students, and inculcate in them the virtues of good and committed citizens. The institution accepted the brief, with teacher education and its professional and utilitarian character as its primary concern. The functioning of the CIE, its priorities, and its development are very much a product of the times and the policies being advocated in the late 1940s and the 1950s. The CIE represents the quintessential department of education envisioned and described by the 1953 Secondary Education Commission, with TE as its core and with the classroom, the school, and the teacher as its focus.

The social implications of school education, although figuring prominently in state rhetoric, were never seriously addressed or backed by the political or financial commitment that a serious project of social justice would require. In keeping with the developmental agenda, it was the higher education sector, especially the sciences and technology, that consumed state resources and attention, and assumed priority at all levels of state planning in the first few decades after independence. The responsibility of fulfilling the complex project of equity in education was being projected as a simple equation of increasing schools and providing good teachers. TE thus assumed a symbolic significance and a sense of importance that the institutions were willing to accept without questioning the implications of the complex web of political, social, and economic structures that no amount of good teaching practice alone could address.

From TE to Education—A Tortured Route

The relationship of education with the foundation disciplines has not been uniform everywhere, but it has been instrumental in shaping the course of the discipline. In Britain, for example, between the 1920s and 1950s education was dominated by psychology and a quasi-scientific paradigm, but from the 1950s onward the advent of the humanities—initially history and philosophy, and subsequently sociology—established the credentials of education as a field of social enquiry. “The foundation disciplines of philosophy, history, psychology and sociology came to the fore, dominating both teacher education and educational research in the UK and much of the English speaking world” (Furlong & Lawn, 2011 , pp. 1–2). In the context of a liberal higher education ethos in the United Kingdom, “By the mid-1970s then, the disciplines were well established both in their general rationale for contributing to the study of education as a whole, and also increasingly as clearly defined and discrete disciplinary communities in their own right.” (McCullogh, 2001 pp. 111–112),

In India, the study of education was sought to be increasingly and exclusively mediated by teacher education, with little space for the disciplines other than psychology, which maintained its dominance by offering a paradigm that could be integrated with the eclectic character of TE. The relevance of the more socially and theoretically oriented foundation disciplines of history, sociology, and philosophy was less obvious, within the template of TE, and the contact remained superficial. The departments drew their strength from their professional and applied orientation, and these disciplines were perceived as beneficial, but not particularly necessary for teachers. The unease of stepping out of the TE format could be partly explained by the antecedents of the departments and the confines within which they evolved that neither required nor were conducive to a serious academic engagement with scholarship, theory, and research in the social sciences.

When TE was being established as an academic discipline within the university, disciplinary experts were appointed for the teaching of the foundation disciplines, but when a larger pool of TE graduates became available, this option was closed off. TE became a requirement for all teaching of education, and a strong resistance to allow direct entry into education without going through the TE route seems to have developed. This has been a complicated relationship and has made it difficult to foster a critical and socially oriented perspective of the many complex aspects of education. It is, however, important to remember that the resistance to the disciplines has its own history and was not always one sided. In the 1950s and 1960s, when departments of education were attempting to integrate into the life of the universities, there was little interest in school education in the social sciences or among scholars within these disciplines. Education departments were regarded as mere “teacher training” institutions, and even within professional disciplines they were held in low esteem and did not merit the status and prestige of medicine or engineering, for example. Thus academic exchanges with other social science departments of the university have always been limited to routine institutional obligations. It is revealing, therefore, that the CIE had its closest links and faculty exchanges with the College of Nursing (another low-status professional sector) of the University of Delhi.

Currently, the study of education is situated in faculties of education and in the numerous colleges of education throughout the country. The BEd continues to occupy a prominent and prestigious position (for a variety of reasons, although it is only one of many TE programs and trains secondary school teachers). It derives enormous importance from its position as the first point of entry into TE and as a prerequisite for the MEd degree, which is a necessary qualification for teaching in TE programs and, more importantly (in convoluted ways), in departments of education.

Admission to the BEd requires students to have studied two school subjects for their undergraduate degree, a condition that prevented the entry of students from three of the four traditional “foundation” disciplines into these programs until the early 1990s, when psychology and sociology were recognized as school subjects whereas students of philosophy continue to remain ineligible for admission. There is no direct entry into the MEd from any discipline other than TE, and because the MEd is a minimum qualification for teaching in education departments, it prevents students from other disciplines who have a serious academic interest in education from being able to work in these departments unless they train as teachers. These conditions for entry, along with the inadequate exposure to the social science perspective on education within the TE route, make it difficult for expertise in the social sciences and an informed critical perspective to be developed and nurtured within the normal institutional conditions and structures described below. 13

The foundational disciplines are a compulsory component of the TE programs, but except for a particular version of psychology (heavily influenced by the educational psychology paradigm of the United States, with strong traces of the behaviorist and learning theory movements), the disciplinary knowledge offered in the programs is extremely inadequate for developing a well-informed social or critical perspective of education, whether students proceed to enter the profession of school teaching or go on to postgraduate study and research. The BEd has a required course in the psychology of education, and topics from psychology are found in other courses, as well as the practical component of training. Similarly the MEd has required and optional psychology courses and a strong imprint of a quasi-scientific research methodology (largely quasi-experimental and testing oriented). The other disciplines—that is, sociology, philosophy, and history—are usually combined in a paper 14 like “Education in India” in the BEd syllabus.

Given the nature and the requirements of the BEd program (a 1-year program that was extended to 2 years in 2016 ), these disciplines seem difficult to connect to the here and now of the classroom and teaching, and are barely able to offer a cursory introduction to the discipline. Serious scholarly engagement with theory and methodologies is nearly impossible through this route alone. It may happen through individual motivation and effort, sometimes of a faculty member and sometimes of an exceptionally interested student, but there is little institutional support for it. The “methods” courses require undergraduate study of the subject, but there is no such requirement for the foundation disciplines. Subsequently, teaching of the foundation disciplines only requires a total of one and a half to two courses that a BEd and MEd is able to offer. It is a well-accepted article of faith within education departments that anyone with an MEd should be able to teach all courses on the syllabus, barring the methodology courses for which disciplinary credentials are essential, 15 and it is not unusual for a commerce, mathematics, or science graduate with little exposure to the social sciences to be teaching philosophy, sociology, or history of education. Largely as a consequence of these trends, research in education, even in the 2000s, with few exceptions, remains focused on the school, the teacher, and the child; and it is confined to a positivist and empiricist paradigm with little theoretical or critical analysis, although this is very slowly changing.

Efforts to establish centers for the study of education from a disciplinary lens as distinct from TE have been made in other ways, and although miniscule within the large education sector, they have steadily managed to pose challenges to the mainstream departments and to TE. For example, in the 1960s, the Tata Institute for Social Sciences in Bombay established a research unit in Sociology of Education; and in the 1970s, The Zakir Husain Centre for Educational Studies (ZHCES) at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, with an MPhil and a PhD program, was established to study education as a social phenomenon, using theoretical and methodological traditions rooted in the foundational disciplines, in this case of sociology, psychology, economics, and history. Within Delhi University itself, the establishment of the bachelor’s in elementary education (the BElEd) was a bold attempt at a teacher education program that allows a deeper and more meaningful engagement with the disciplines both at the theoretical and the practical levels. This program is producing well-rounded, socially aware teachers, but is only grudgingly being accepted by the teacher education community. These programs have succeeded in raising important questions about education and society, but mainstream TE institutions, even in major universities, continue to ignore their contribution and often treat then dismissively. The resistance in the TE community to accepting TE programs as only one among other ways of engaging with education is still profound. It surfaced most recently in response to the Justice Verma Commission’s recommendations for radical changes in TE, especially at the suggestion for a greater and more direct engagement with the disciplines. A more extensive discussion of these developments, although extremely relevant for the future of education in India, is, however, beyond the scope of this article.

The Disciplines in Education and the Turn to Psychology

Psychology and, on a smaller scale, the history of education were integrated into the TE curriculum as early as the late 1800s, and subsequently philosophy and sociology of education were recommended as disciplines relevant to the study of education. In this section, I look at how a particular model of psychology and its subject matter, in being closely aligned with the interests of TE, became the discipline of choice for establishing the academic credentials of the departments as they started to integrate more seriously into the academic life of the university. I suggest, however, that the nature of the model of psychology that education chose to adopt (for a variety of reasons) further strengthened its empirical and asocial character and alienated it from a critical social science perspective.

Although the framework for the creation of a new discipline or disciplinary field could have modeled itself on any of the disciplines that it had already adopted as foundational disciplines, or even as a combination of these, it was quite evidently psychology that most easily lent itself to this task. As a behavioral rather than a social science, psychology in the first half of the 20th century was steeped in the exploration of learning and the study of children, successfully modifying human behavior, and measuring mental capacities. It was able to provide the scientific backing for teaching practice and pedagogical methods that could enable TE to assert its academic credentials.

The emergence of psychology coincided with developments in mass education, and many of the leading concerns of psychology were issues of deep interest for education, such as child development, learning, personality, and so on. References to the importance of psychology are present in the earliest documents mentioned in “ The Genesis of a Discipline: Teacher Education in British India ,” and the early “professional” components of teacher training began to include psychological content applicable to pedagogical practice. The core content of the TE program—the “methods of teaching” courses—depended heavily on theories of psychology and on psychological research. The overlap of interests between psychology and education is evident, and therefore the relationship is not surprising. Major sub-fields of psychology, such as educational psychology, child psychology, and organizational psychology, were directly related to schooling and the classrooms.

However the juncture at which education as a field began to establish itself within the academy and the then-popular paradigm of psychology is also critical in understanding the obvious as well as the more subtle ways in which psychology was to influence educational research and practice in the Indian context. In the 1950s and 1960s, when the departments of education in India began to acquire an identity and improve their status within a somewhat hostile and condescending environment of the academy, the appeal of psychology seems inevitable. An eclectic, useful, and applicable psychology, with its quasi-scientific methodologies and theories of behaviorism and individual difference, seemed ideal for deriving its academic and research credentials. This model of psychology, popular in the anglophone world, suited the needs of a growing field of education and was eagerly adopted by TE in India. This was a time when the world of Indian academics was widely exposed to scholarship and academic currents from Britain and the United States. In fact the initial post-independence Commissions on education included educationists and academics from Britain and the United States as members, and in the 1960s a team of American educationists was invited for consultations at the CIE when the NCERT was established.

The version of psychology that captured the imagination of TE in India is best exemplified in an account by Peter Manicas in his 1987 history of the social sciences in America, where he describes psychology as the “exemplar” of the Americanization of social science. He claims that its inspiration was drawn from the study of individual differences, initiated in Britain, that was infinitely more appealing in America than the study of the normal adult mind initiated by the Germans, and this determined the course of psychology for decades to come in the English-speaking world. Moreover, in America, he notes, the social usefulness of disciplines was paramount and “redefining psychology as the ‘science of behavior’ would eventually do the trick” and establish its instrumental value (Manicas, 1987 , p. 234). According to Boring:

American psychology was to deal with mind in use. . . . Thorndike brought the animals into the formal laboratory . . . then went over the study of school children and the mental tests increased. . . . Then Watson touched a match to the mass, there was an explosion and behaviorism was left. (Quoted by Manicas, 1987 )

Terman was to declare in 1920 :

It is the method of tests that has brought psychology down from the clouds and made it useful to men: that has transformed the “science of trivialities” into the “science of human engineering” . . . No psychologist of today can complain that his science is not taken seriously enough. (Quoted by Manicas, 1987 )

The goal of scientific psychology was prediction and control, and in the context of 1950s America, the term “social science” was formally changed to “behavioral science” and without any remorse or conceptual embarrassment then the human sciences would now unite in seeing themselves as jointly concerned with behavior and with individuals who could be both mindless and asocial, the happy robots of the Great American Celebration” (Quoted by Manicas, 1987 , pp. 236–237). Here, this description is used very consciously to describe the model of a social science that was adopted in India by those shaping education and educational research.

TE as a field had little theoretical coherence, and its practitioners were drawn from the range of disciplines that made up the school curriculum—from languages to the social sciences, to mathematics, commerce, and the physical sciences. The empiricist and positivist nature of an asocial and scientific model of psychology had immediate appeal for lending coherence and legitimacy to the professional status claimed by education.

A brief scrutiny of the curriculum and research in TE illustrates the influence of psychology in its teaching and research, and subsequently how research and theory in education was thus shaped by psychology through its evolutionary period as a field of studies.

Psychology and the TE Curriculum

When teacher training was first established, the professional component of its teaching relied on theories in psychology. As a component of the foundation courses, it has always carried more weight than the other foundation disciplines, and the earliest theory courses in a formalized TE curriculum included content from psychology. Besides contributing to teaching practice and courses on pedagogy, research methods courses in education were initially derived from the psychometric tradition of psychology, and although other methodologies have gradually been incorporated, this research tradition remains deeply entrenched even today. Textbooks of research design and statistics in psychology have been used as standard texts in the departments of education, and the educational psychology paradigm has had a profound influence on TE in India. The CIE established a psychological laboratory in the 1960s, and a weekly “Practicum in Psychology” was a compulsory component of the BEd program, complete with experiments using psychological testing tools like the mirror drawing apparatus and the memory drum. When the Secondary Teacher’s College, another very eminent institution for TE, was consolidated into the MS University of Baroda, it was transformed into the Faculty of Education and Psychology, and among its three foundation courses, two were in psychology—one on the “Psychology of Individual Difference” and the other a “Psychology of Learning” course (see Menon & Mathew, 2016 ).

The “Teacher Education Curriculum—a Framework” prepared by the NCERT in 1978 (NCERT, 1978 ) divides the course work for secondary school teaching into three sections. The first part, with a weightage of 30%, consists of the foundation courses, or what it calls “pedagogical courses” and includes three papers: the “Teacher and Education in Emerging Indian Society,” which combines topics from sociology, history, and philosophy; “Educational Psychology”; and “Psychology of Adolescence.” The second section involves “Working with the Community,” with a weightage of 20%. The third section is “Content cum Methodology and Practice Teaching,” with a weightage of 50%. These courses, too, include topics from psychology and psychological research related to learning and teaching.

A “Framework for Teacher Education” prepared by the NCERT ( 1988 ) for the MEd grants a weightage of 20% to the foundation courses and allots 10% to educational psychology and 10% to a paper that combines philosophical and sociological perspectives, along with a summary history of education in India. It is only in 1998 that the framework for TE curriculum suggests allotting a complete paper to the philosophy of education and one to the sociology of education, along with the psychology of education paper for the MEd program. The content of the foundation papers at the BEd level is far more limited.

Psychology and Research in Education

Finally, in providing a model for research, psychology was able to wield a profound influence on TE and subsequently on education, especially because TE was accepted as the legitimate framework for the development of the discipline.

A research component had been introduced in the master’s program in TE as early as the 1930s, and MPhil and PhD programs were launched subsequently. Given their background, TE departments had little occasion to provide a theoretical framework to sustain a research program, and needed to rely on its foundational disciplines. Within the objectives of TE, an eclectic and empirical model of research based on the behaviorist and positivist framework in psychology was best suited to its needs as well as its capacities, and became the preferred model for research even when this began to go beyond the confines of TE.

A review of a hundred PhD dissertations of the CIE (starting in 1958 , when its first PhD was submitted) demonstrates the strong influence of psychology and its research paradigm on educational research. The dissertations span a period of almost three decades, from the 1950s to the 1980s, the time when the basic structures, practice, and broad contours of education were established.

This analysis reveals that 53 of the 100 dissertations are directly influenced by and draw from the subject matter of psychology. The topics of study range from intelligence, learning, and reasoning, to personality, levels of anxiety, attitudes, job satisfaction, ego strength, values, and so on. Standardized psychological questionnaires and tests are common “research tools,” and intelligence tests, personality tests, interest inventories, and a slew of other psychological “instruments” have been widely used. Construction of standardized tests is also a trend, including tests of psychological and social variables, and this extends to construction of tests for school subjects like mathematics, sciences, and the social sciences. The studies are predominantly empirical, with extensive use of quantitative research methodology and statistical analysis of the data. Standard texts for research in psychology that have been commonly used by educational psychology were recommended texts and continue to be used even today. 16

A few of the studies described here reflect the general trend of research through these years and the influence of research paradigms in psychology. The Influence of Home Environment on School Children (Mehra, 1980 ) is a study of the effects of home environment on academic achievement, self-concept, social adjustment, and intelligence. The tools used for the study include a family attitude test, a sociometric test for social adjustment, the Goodenough drawing test for intelligence, and interviews based on the work of Sears et al. ( 1957 ) on child rearing. The analysis of the data uses the chi square technique to establish relationships.

Backwardness in Mathematics and Basic Arithmetic Skills (Gupta, 1971 ) is a correlational study and Development of Interests of Boys of Secondary Schools in Calcutta West Bengal in Reference to Four Different Streams VIZ Humanities, Sciences, Technology, and Commerce in Multilateral Schools (Bardhan, 1972 ), is a comparative study of interest levels of students of the four streams. Interests are measured using an adaptation of the Strong vocational interest blank and Kuder’s preference record. Data are analyzed using correlation techniques and t-tests.

Other research titles include:

Comparative study of Tribal and non-tribal intelligence (Sinha, 1964 )

Experimental study of the effect of reciprocal inhibition therapy on anxiety in adolescents (Bhatia, 1977 )

Study of achievement motivation in relation to intelligence, vocational interests, achievement, sex and socioeconomic status (Abrol, 1977 )

Study of problems and personality profiles of truants in various types of schools in Delhi with a view to suggesting measures to check them (Sunder, 1979 )

Identification of personality variables associated with creative writing in Hindi (Pathak, 1982 )

A second set of studies come under the rubric of history of education. There are 10 such dissertations that cover both the colonial period and education after independence. These are primarily accounts that trace educational developments through a specific time span or a specific region, for example, “History and Survey of Education in Ratnagiri District” (Rege, 1961 ), “Educational Development in British India” (Shukla, 1958 ), “Policy in Madras Presidency 1800–1900” (Sargurudoss, 1961 ), and so on. The majority of these are simple linear narratives of educational developments of the period, with little or no attempt at a deeper historical analysis.

Six dissertations use the terminology of sociology, and although a few are in-depth studies with a critical or theoretical analysis, most are straightforward evaluative accounts, for evaluation of training programmes for social education workers in India the evaluation of environmental education in primary education in Bangladesh (Ehsan, 1985 ), with no attempt at historicizing the phenomenon or any in-depth theoretical or social analyses of larger contexts and structures within which the phenomena operate. The subject of the evaluations ranges from educational programs, innovations, or organizations (often NGOs) to curriculum, pedagogy, and use of instructional materials. Although these contribute useful data, they are more in the nature of reports rather than research studies.

In this span of almost four decades there is only one dissertation in philosophy, entitled Approaches to Educational Theory—A Philosophical Probe (Mathur, 1985 ).

This leaning toward empirical, ahistorical and atheoretical work is not specific to the CIE, and departments throughout the country follow a similar pattern. The department of Education, set up in 1938 at the Jamia Millia Islamia, 17 another Central University situated in Delhi and reputed for its teacher education programs, was a celebrated outcome of the deliberations on Gandhi’s Nai Taleem, a revolutionary concept of education that sought to confront colonialism, caste, and class through education. Despite its radical and anti-colonial origins, it failed to develop its critical and social perspective after independence and moved toward the mainstream model that education adopted throughout the country.

In a survey of 35 dissertations submitted between 1974 and 2000 , in the department of education of this university (Jamia Millia Islamia, 2008 ), 26 dissertations are studies of relationships between sets of variables of a psychological nature. A majority of these are correlational or comparative studies looking at differences between groups or quasi-experimental research using a variety of statistical techniques. Correlations, t-tests, and Chi square and other statistical techniques popular in psychological research at the time are common.

The following list of titles serves to illustrate the trend of research, orientation, and methodology:

Mental and socioeconomic levels of children as determinants of moral judgment (Kalra, 1978 )

Variations in moral judgment in relation to caste, sex, and socioeconomic status (Soni, 1982 )

Intellectual development in relationship with creativity, socioeconomic status, and achievement levels of science students (Kumar, 1987 )

Differences in personality traits and socioeconomic status of sportswomen and non- sportswomen (Sandhu, 1988 )

Psychological tests of personality, intelligence, anxiety, creativity, and so on, are extensively used in these studies, and the results are analyzed through standard statistical techniques, in the trend seen at the CIE. This department, however, offers a program in educational administration and management, and therefore includes dissertations pertaining to educational management, administration, and financing of education, with a clear influence of research in organizational psychology.

The behaviorist influence in educational research has been pervasive, and despite efforts to introduce theoretical frameworks with qualitative methods and social and critical perspectives, the majority of research conducted in education is rooted in this methodological framework. It can be understood in light of the history of the discipline and in its TE core that was focused much more seriously on its professional status and its applied aspects. Within this context, a “neutral” and “scientific” model seemed to address its concerns and allowed it to conduct what was seen as relevant research. For all the reasons that an experimental and strictly empirical model of research in psychology began to lose its luster, it has by and large failed to produce original, substantive, and useful research in education and has not been conducive to the cause of creating a critical, social perspective. In fact, as recently as 2016 , Menon and Mathew ( 2016 , pp. 161–162), in commenting on research at the MPhil and PhD level, observed that “this is not planned or implemented with any seriousness or reflection; whatever happens is sporadic and not by design.”

In an essay entitled “Education and the Genesis of Disciplinarity: The Unexpected Reversal,” Hoskin ( 1993 ) refers to the ambiguous status of education in discussing the evolution of the disciplines within the structures of modern universities. He makes the assertion: “Education is not a discipline. Today to even consider Education as a discipline is a discomfort and embarrassment. Education is a sub-discipline, a melting pot for other ‘real’ disciplines, best disregarded in serious academic company” (p. 271). Citing a major 1979 volume by Oleson and Voss on the emergence of disciplines, covering the period 1860–1920 , he notes that it has neither index entry nor a chapter devoted to education. Although he goes on to make a different argument about the genesis of disciplines and how advances in education actually helped to define them, the paper reflects a crisis of identity that continues to afflict education as a discipline. This ambiguity about its identity is at the heart of the debates about the role of the foundation disciplines in education and has been addressed in different ways by educational systems around the world.

This article, in tracing the history of what are now well-established departments of education within the university system in India, is an attempt to identify some key factors and moments that have shaped educational studies, its strong identification with TE, and its varying interactions with the foundation disciplines. It attempts also to unravel the barriers that have gradually evolved to prevent an open and serious exchange with the social science disciplines and the conditions under which this gradual isolation took place. This history is important and captures the underlying tensions of transforming a practical, applied, and what was primarily conceived of as a professional field into a theoretical and academic discipline within the intellectual and scholarly milieu of the university. The long period of its transformation from a very rudimentary agenda of “teacher training” for primary schools, to a better thought-out and academically more grounded program of teacher education involved considerable effort and investment and finally led to the creation of departments of education. Although the agenda of ultimately working toward a more critical social sciences perspective was part of the vision for an emerging discipline, within the field itself TE took priority and became the sole focus of the departments.

After 1947 , as the emphasis on providing mass education for unprecedented numbers gave added impetus and importance to the TE programs, the newly integrated departments chose to identify with TE and its professional status, to establish their position within the university. The debates, discussions, and recommendations among the educational community, both before and after the country’s independence from colonial rule, are testimony to the anxiety over introducing theory without making it relevant and applicable. Recurrent concerns about the status of the discipline, the credentials of those entering the teaching profession, and the nature and quality of the education being imparted are also apparent. This context was able to integrate most easily and comfortably with a behaviorist and positivist model of psychology that was directly applicable in schools and classrooms, and useful for teachers and students.

The role of the foundation disciplines in education has always been contested, but equally there are many examples where the disciplines have had considerable influence and have contributed substantively to teaching, research, and theory in education. In India, it has been a fraught relationship and has been determined by the concerns and the mediation of TE. Between the 1950s and the 1980s, when disciplinary inputs into education were at a peak in the Anglophone world, education in India was closing the possibility of any such exchange. This was a time when the study of school education did not carry much prestige, and few serious scholars from the social science disciplines were willing to engage with it. In these circumstances, education chose to rely on its professional and applied nature and was inevitably driven toward an individualistic, quasi-scientific, and empirical stance of psychology—the “science” of human behavior—to establish its academic credentials within the university. These choices determined a course that put severe limits on any meaningful engagement with the more critical and social aspects of the other foundational disciplines and the lens they provide for interrogating education and society.

Although education as a well-defined discipline is yet to emerge, a field of educational studies has been taking shape, occasionally out of efforts of the traditional departments themselves and increasingly in departments, universities, and centers that have emerged independent of the TE model. Either way, there is a recognition of the issues of school education as encompassing much more than schools, children, and teachers, and the need for inter-disciplinary collaboration. The task becomes more difficult in the current context of a worldwide shift toward a neoliberal agenda, an increasing tendency toward privatization of education, and demands for a business model, all of which are being endorsed by the Indian state. The added pressure of shrinking spaces for the social sciences within universities are cause for serious concern that has provoked debates and discussion about a need for the disciplines and for a critical perspective in education. 18 A utilitarian agenda in the interests of a global capitalist economy is threatening the progressive and critical perspective that the social sciences espouse—a perspective that will be crucially needed if education is to fulfill its potential as an instrument for social change and the constitutional promise of social justice.

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1. Teacher training was initially meant for primary school teachers, who were identified from among promising students and given special attention under a master while following their regular school education. The training was later shifted to a more formal institutional setting, and these were designated as “normal” schools, the term having originated in France from the ecole normale , or a “model” school where training of teachers was the primary focus.

2. See Hoskin ( 1993 ). He suggests that education in the early 19th century could have claimed a different status by taking on the mantle of great figures like Durkheim and Dewey, but chose instead to accept a sub-disciplinary status and lost its disciplinary voice.

3. Bitter debates on what education can and should include, how a social science perspective is to be integrated, and which theoretical perspectives are appropriate have been ever present, sometimes very openly and at other times more subtly within the education community; and other than the fact that it encompasses all issues related to education, there is little consensus on any other aspect, and its identity remains diffuse.

4. This article must not to be seen as a critique of teacher education. It does, however, assert that the concerns of TE and education, although overlapping, are not identical and that interlinking the two so closely has not served either of them well.

5. Thus a 1-year teacher training course in Nagpur in 1892 introduced courses on the “History and Principles of Education” and “School Method” as well as one on “Organization and Discipline.” Bombay introduced two new courses—one in the history of education and general methods; and another one called “Special Methods, School Organization and Hygiene.” Physical training, art, and technical subjects were introduced along with “Methods of Teaching and Knowing the Child,” and domestic economy and needlework were introduced for women teachers. In Ahmedabad, a course for the higher certificate (presumably secondary schools) in addition to school subjects also included “Music and Singing,” “Arts and Crafts,” “Blackboard Drawing and Class Teaching,” and “History of Education,” “Theory of Educatio,” and “Organization and Methods of Education” (see Devi, 1968 ).

6. This was a scheme of education proposed by M. K. Gandhi, a leader of India’s struggle for independence, and elaborated by Dr. Zakir Husain, an educationist and one of the architects of the University of Jamia Millia Islamia, which advocated manual work and craft as an integral part of schooling and learning. Passed at a national conference of education at Wardha in 1937, under Gandhi’s leadership, the scheme was aimed at creating a more holistic system of education that would enable schools to become self-sufficient and thus independent of the colonial power, and at the same time revolutionize the social order.

7. See Velaskar ( 2010 ) for a more detailed discussion on this shift and the ensuing implications for education.

8. The author of this article is deeply indebted to Prof. Mehrotra, who graciously received her at home, talked to her at length, and also provided her with several documents and the draft notes of a memoir that he was in the process of compiling in 2018. The bulk of the information in CIE comes from him. I also interacted with Prof. Nargis Panchpakesan, Professor Najma Siddiqui, Prof. Shyam Menon, Dr. Jayshree Mathur, and Prof. Namita Ranganathan, all of whom have taught at the CIE and been closely associated with the institute and its history. Professor Mehrotra’s memoir was finally published in 2019, and he passed away in the same year.

9. “These Fifty Years of CIE,” is the title of a talk that Prof. R. N. Mehrotra delivered at the CIE, and forms part of his autobiographical memoir (Mehrota, 2019 ).

10. The Planning Commission was set up by the Government of India in 1950, when a model of centralized planning was adopted. It was responsible for formulating the 5-year plans that were to assess and utilize economic and human resources in all sectors, including education, at a national level.

11. “Methodology teachers” was the term used for faculty who were appointed as experts in school subjects. They were expected to strengthen the pupil teachers’ knowledge of school subjects, as well as to train students in pedagogic skills needed for teaching the subject.

12. This passage is part of a talk that Prof. Mehrotra delivered at the CIE, for which he gave the author of this article a transcript.

13. The Justice Verma Commission , which reviewed teacher education and made several recommendations for restructuring the field.

14. A “paper” is usually a 3 credit course taught over one semester.

15. See the report by the high-powered Commission on Teacher Education, chaired by Justice Verma, also referred to as the Verma Committee Report. In a comprehensive critique of the TE programs, it refers to how current programs fail on account of their lack of engagement with “knowledge about the socio-cultural context and philosophical basis of education and learning” (p. 14).

16. Textbooks that combined research methodology and statistics for psychology and education were standard reference material in departments of education (see, e.g., Minium, 1978 ), and although qualitative methodologies have very slowly found their way into the syllabi, these texts are very much in use in educational research, even today.

17. The department here was established within the framework of the deliberations on Gandhi’s “Nai Taleem,” a revolutionary concept of education that sought to confront colonialism, caste, and class through education. The history of this institution could have veered off on a different track, but although it started off on a very different course and had the potential to develop a different model of education, it finally succumbed to the mainstream.

18. See Nambissan and Rao ( 2013 ) for a discussion of the changing scenario of education in India. Furlong and Lawn ( 2011 ) and Furlong ( 2013 ) discuss the issue in the contemporary context, with important insights into the international and global changes and pressures on universities and education.

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What Is Education? Insights from the World's Greatest Minds

Forty thought-provoking quotes about education..

Posted May 12, 2014 | Reviewed by Ekua Hagan

As we seek to refine and reform today’s system of education , we would do well to ask, “What is education?” Our answers may provide insights that get to the heart of what matters for 21st century children and adults alike.

It is important to step back from divisive debates on grades, standardized testing, and teacher evaluation—and really look at the meaning of education. So I decided to do just that—to research the answer to this straightforward, yet complex question.

Looking for wisdom from some of the greatest philosophers, poets, educators, historians, theologians, politicians, and world leaders, I found answers that should not only exist in our history books, but also remain at the core of current education dialogue.

In my work as a developmental psychologist, I constantly struggle to balance the goals of formal education with the goals of raising healthy, happy children who grow to become contributing members of families and society. Along with academic skills, the educational journey from kindergarten through college is a time when young people develop many interconnected abilities.

As you read through the following quotes, you’ll discover common threads that unite the intellectual, social, emotional, and physical aspects of education. For me, good education facilitates the development of an internal compass that guides us through life.

Which quotes resonate most with you? What images of education come to your mind? How can we best integrate the wisdom of the ages to address today’s most pressing education challenges?

If you are a middle or high school teacher, I invite you to have your students write an essay entitled, “What is Education?” After reviewing the famous quotes below and the images they evoke, ask students to develop their very own quote that answers this question. With their unique quote highlighted at the top of their essay, ask them to write about what helps or hinders them from getting the kind of education they seek. I’d love to publish some student quotes, essays, and images in future articles, so please contact me if students are willing to share!

What Is Education? Answers from 5th Century BC to the 21 st Century

• The principle goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done. — Jean Piaget, 1896-1980, Swiss developmental psychologist, philosopher
• An education isn't how much you have committed to memory , or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don't. — Anatole France, 1844-1924, French poet, novelist
• Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world. — Nelson Mandela, 1918-2013, South African President, philanthropist
• The object of education is to teach us to love beauty. — Plato, 424-348 BC, philosopher mathematician
• The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character - that is the goal of true education — Martin Luther King, Jr., 1929-1968, pastor, activist, humanitarian
• Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school. Albert Einstein, 1879-1955, physicist
• It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. — Aristotle, 384-322 BC, Greek philosopher, scientist
• Education is the power to think clearly, the power to act well in the world’s work, and the power to appreciate life. — Brigham Young, 1801-1877, religious leader
• Real education should educate us out of self into something far finer – into a selflessness which links us with all humanity. — Nancy Astor, 1879-1964, American-born English politician and socialite
• Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire. — William Butler Yeats, 1865-1939, Irish poet
• Education is freedom . — Paulo Freire, 1921-1997, Brazilian educator, philosopher
• Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself. — John Dewey, 1859-1952, philosopher, psychologist, education reformer
• Education is the key to unlock the golden door of freedom. — George Washington Carver, 1864-1943, scientist, botanist, educator
• Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught. — Oscar Wilde, 1854-1900, Irish writer, poet
• The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows. — Sydney J. Harris, 1917-1986, journalist
• Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one. — Malcolm Forbes, 1919-1990, publisher, politician
• No one has yet realized the wealth of sympathy, the kindness and generosity hidden in the soul of a child. The effort of every true education should be to unlock that treasure. — Emma Goldman, 1869 – 1940, political activist, writer
• Much education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants. — John W. Gardner, 1912-2002, Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare under President Lyndon Johnson
• Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another. — Gilbert K. Chesterton, 1874-1936, English writer, theologian, poet, philosopher
• Education is the movement from darkness to light. — Allan Bloom, 1930-1992, philosopher, classicist, and academician
• Education is learning what you didn't even know you didn't know. -- Daniel J. Boorstin, 1914-2004, historian, professor, attorney
• The aim of education is the knowledge, not of facts, but of values. — William S. Burroughs, 1914-1997, novelist, essayist, painter
• The object of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives. -- Robert M. Hutchins, 1899-1977, educational philosopher
• Education is all a matter of building bridges. — Ralph Ellison, 1914-1994, novelist, literary critic, scholar
• What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to the soul. — Joseph Addison, 1672-1719, English essayist, poet, playwright, politician
• Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today. — Malcolm X, 1925-1965, minister and human rights activist
• Education is the key to success in life, and teachers make a lasting impact in the lives of their students. — Solomon Ortiz, 1937-, former U.S. Representative-TX
• The very spring and root of honesty and virtue lie in good education. — Plutarch, 46-120AD, Greek historian, biographer, essayist
• Education is a shared commitment between dedicated teachers, motivated students and enthusiastic parents with high expectations. — Bob Beauprez, 1948-, former member of U.S. House of Representatives-CO
• The most influential of all educational factors is the conversation in a child’s home. — William Temple, 1881-1944, English bishop, teacher
• Education is the leading of human souls to what is best, and making what is best out of them. — John Ruskin, 1819-1900, English writer, art critic, philanthropist
• Education levels the playing field, allowing everyone to compete. — Joyce Meyer, 1943-, Christian author and speaker
• Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten. — B.F. Skinner , 1904-1990, psychologist, behaviorist, social philosopher
• The great end of education is to discipline rather than to furnish the mind; to train it to the use of its own powers rather than to fill it with the accumulation of others. — Tyron Edwards, 1809-1894, theologian
• Let us think of education as the means of developing our greatest abilities, because in each of us there is a private hope and dream which, fulfilled, can be translated into benefit for everyone and greater strength of the nation. — John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963, 35 th President of the United States
• Education is like a lantern which lights your way in a dark alley. — Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, 1918-2004, President of the United Arab Emirates for 33 years
• When educating the minds of our youth, we must not forget to educate their hearts. — Dalai Lama, spiritual head of Tibetan Buddhism
• Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or self-confidence . — Robert Frost, 1874-1963, poet
• The secret in education lies in respecting the student. — Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803-1882, essayist, lecturer, and poet
• My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance, but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and more intelligent than college professors. — Maya Angelou, 1928-, author, poet

©2014 Marilyn Price-Mitchell. All rights reserved. Please contact for permission to reprint.

Marilyn Price-Mitchell, Ph.D., is an Institute for Social Innovation Fellow at Fielding Graduate University and author of Tomorrow’s Change Makers.

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Educational Psychology Overview

Educational Psychology…..advancing theory and methods to better learning and performance.

Educational psychology is the study of how humans learn and retain knowledge, primarily in educational settings like classrooms. This includes emotional, social, and cognitive learning processes. Areas of focus might include teaching, testing and assessment methods, psychometrics, classroom or learning environments, and learning, social, and behavioral problems that may impede learning, technology in learning. Graduates work as professors, education specialists, learning analysts, program evaluators, and find positions in research institutions, school systems, the testing industry, government agencies, and private industry.

The mission of Educational Psychology at WSU is to produce successful professionals in educational psychology who have strong methodological skills, understanding of researchable topics, the ability to develop a research program, effectively communicate and work with a wide variety of professionals, and skills to understand nuance and ambiguity in the work environment.

We train students within educational psychology to be excellent consumers and producers of research in order to address challenging educational problems.  These students gain a deep understanding of learning theory and methods to allow them to contribute to both theory and practice in the domain in which they select to work.  The work in such areas may be awarded, for example, by the  ability to make contributions to the improvement of educational settings (e.g., schools, universities), to have a direct influence on individuals through the development of programs, methods, and tools to meet their needs, or to provide information to individuals who shape policy. Thus, we seek individuals who will first meet challenging academic standards for entrance and show promise for success in the exciting field of educational psychology.

Our programs

Our program offers two degree options with a specialization in Educational Psychology; the Master of Arts (M.A.) and the Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) . The M.A. and Ph.D. programs culminate with the writing and oral defense of a formal thesis or dissertation. Students pursuing a master’s degree can expect to complete the program in two years and doctoral students can expect to finish in three to five years beyond the master’s degree.

The core requirements in Research, Evaluation, Measurement, Learning and Cognition provide students with a solid academic foundation. Programs afford some flexibility to tailor course work to individual student preferences and research options. Through faculty and student partnerships across campus, the program provides an exciting, interdisciplinary atmosphere for course and field study.

Graduates in educational psychology can expect employment in private firms, school districts, universities, business, industry, or state agencies. For example, graduates work for: test companies as researchers, university as professors and researchers, and assessment offices across the United States.

Our Ph.D. program equips students with the knowledge of learning theories and strong methodological, evaluation and assessment skills to conduct research on diverse issues relevant to education and beyond. Students are expected to integrate theoretical understanding with research and internship opportunities offered by the university to solve educational problems and improve policy and practice. The Educational Psychology faculty are committed to mentoring graduate students to develop their own body of research, publish in top tier journals, present at conferences and gain career-related skills. Students can also obtain research methods certificates while completing their master’s work in the Learning and Performance Research Center as well as research laboratories directed by Educational Psychology faculty.

For more information, you can email us at  [email protected]  or complete this short  survey  and a faculty member will contact you.

How to Write a Psychology Essay

Saul Mcleod, PhD

Editor-in-Chief for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester

Saul Mcleod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

Learn about our Editorial Process

Olivia Guy-Evans, MSc

Associate Editor for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MSc Psychology of Education

Olivia Guy-Evans is a writer and associate editor for Simply Psychology. She has previously worked in healthcare and educational sectors.

On This Page:

Before you write your essay, it’s important to analyse the task and understand exactly what the essay question is asking. Your lecturer may give you some advice – pay attention to this as it will help you plan your answer.

Next conduct preliminary reading based on your lecture notes. At this stage, it’s not crucial to have a robust understanding of key theories or studies, but you should at least have a general “gist” of the literature.

After reading, plan a response to the task. This plan could be in the form of a mind map, a summary table, or by writing a core statement (which encompasses the entire argument of your essay in just a few sentences).

After writing your plan, conduct supplementary reading, refine your plan, and make it more detailed.

It is tempting to skip these preliminary steps and write the first draft while reading at the same time. However, reading and planning will make the essay writing process easier, quicker, and ensure a higher quality essay is produced.

Components of a Good Essay

Now, let us look at what constitutes a good essay in psychology. There are a number of important features.

• Global Structure – structure the material to allow for a logical sequence of ideas. Each paragraph / statement should follow sensibly from its predecessor. The essay should “flow”. The introduction, main body and conclusion should all be linked.
• Each paragraph should comprise a main theme, which is illustrated and developed through a number of points (supported by evidence).
• Knowledge and Understanding – recognize, recall, and show understanding of a range of scientific material that accurately reflects the main theoretical perspectives.
• Critical Evaluation – arguments should be supported by appropriate evidence and/or theory from the literature. Evidence of independent thinking, insight, and evaluation of the evidence.
• Quality of Written Communication – writing clearly and succinctly with appropriate use of paragraphs, spelling, and grammar. All sources are referenced accurately and in line with APA guidelines.

In the main body of the essay, every paragraph should demonstrate both knowledge and critical evaluation.

There should also be an appropriate balance between these two essay components. Try to aim for about a 60/40 split if possible.

Most students make the mistake of writing too much knowledge and not enough evaluation (which is the difficult bit).

It is best to structure your essay according to key themes. Themes are illustrated and developed through a number of points (supported by evidence).

Choose relevant points only, ones that most reveal the theme or help to make a convincing and interesting argument.

Knowledge and Understanding

Remember that an essay is simply a discussion / argument on paper. Don’t make the mistake of writing all the information you know regarding a particular topic.

You need to be concise, and clearly articulate your argument. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences.

Each paragraph should have a purpose / theme, and make a number of points – which need to be support by high quality evidence. Be clear why each point is is relevant to the argument. It would be useful at the beginning of each paragraph if you explicitly outlined the theme being discussed (.e.g. cognitive development, social development etc.).

Try not to overuse quotations in your essays. It is more appropriate to use original content to demonstrate your understanding.

Psychology is a science so you must support your ideas with evidence (not your own personal opinion). If you are discussing a theory or research study make sure you cite the source of the information.

Note this is not the author of a textbook you have read – but the original source / author(s) of the theory or research study.

For example:

Bowlby (1951) claimed that mothering is almost useless if delayed until after two and a half to three years and, for most children, if delayed till after 12 months, i.e. there is a critical period.

Maslow (1943) stated that people are motivated to achieve certain needs. When one need is fulfilled a person seeks to fullfil the next one, and so on.

As a general rule, make sure there is at least one citation (i.e. name of psychologist and date of publication) in each paragraph.

Remember to answer the essay question. Underline the keywords in the essay title. Don’t make the mistake of simply writing everything you know of a particular topic, be selective. Each paragraph in your essay should contribute to answering the essay question.

Critical Evaluation

In simple terms, this means outlining the strengths and limitations of a theory or research study.

There are many ways you can critically evaluate:

Methodological evaluation of research

Is the study valid / reliable ? Is the sample biased, or can we generalize the findings to other populations? What are the strengths and limitations of the method used and data obtained?

Be careful to ensure that any methodological criticisms are justified and not trite.

Rather than hunting for weaknesses in every study; only highlight limitations that make you doubt the conclusions that the authors have drawn – e.g., where an alternative explanation might be equally likely because something hasn’t been adequately controlled.

Compare or contrast different theories

Outline how the theories are similar and how they differ. This could be two (or more) theories of personality / memory / child development etc. Also try to communicate the value of the theory / study.

Debates or perspectives

Refer to debates such as nature or nurture, reductionism vs. holism, or the perspectives in psychology . For example, would they agree or disagree with a theory or the findings of the study?

What are the ethical issues of the research?

Does a study involve ethical issues such as deception, privacy, psychological or physical harm?

Gender bias

If research is biased towards men or women it does not provide a clear view of the behavior that has been studied. A dominantly male perspective is known as an androcentric bias.

Cultural bias

Is the theory / study ethnocentric? Psychology is predominantly a white, Euro-American enterprise. In some texts, over 90% of studies have US participants, who are predominantly white and middle class.

Does the theory or study being discussed judge other cultures by Western standards?

Animal Research

This raises the issue of whether it’s morally and/or scientifically right to use animals. The main criterion is that benefits must outweigh costs. But benefits are almost always to humans and costs to animals.

Animal research also raises the issue of extrapolation. Can we generalize from studies on animals to humans as their anatomy & physiology is different from humans?

The PEC System

It is very important to elaborate on your evaluation. Don’t just write a shopping list of brief (one or two sentence) evaluation points.

Instead, make sure you expand on your points, remember, quality of evaluation is most important than quantity.

When you are writing an evaluation paragraph, use the PEC system.

• Make your P oint.
• E xplain how and why the point is relevant.
• Discuss the C onsequences / implications of the theory or study. Are they positive or negative?

For Example

• Point: It is argued that psychoanalytic therapy is only of benefit to an articulate, intelligent, affluent minority.
• Explain: Because psychoanalytic therapy involves talking and gaining insight, and is costly and time-consuming, it is argued that it is only of benefit to an articulate, intelligent, affluent minority. Evidence suggests psychoanalytic therapy works best if the client is motivated and has a positive attitude.
• Consequences: A depressed client’s apathy, flat emotional state, and lack of motivation limit the appropriateness of psychoanalytic therapy for depression.

Furthermore, the levels of dependency of depressed clients mean that transference is more likely to develop.

Using Research Studies in your Essays

Research studies can either be knowledge or evaluation.

• If you refer to the procedures and findings of a study, this shows knowledge and understanding.
• If you comment on what the studies shows, and what it supports and challenges about the theory in question, this shows evaluation.

Writing an Introduction

It is often best to write your introduction when you have finished the main body of the essay, so that you have a good understanding of the topic area.

If there is a word count for your essay try to devote 10% of this to your introduction.

Ideally, the introduction should;

Identify the subject of the essay and define the key terms. Highlight the major issues which “lie behind” the question. Let the reader know how you will focus your essay by identifying the main themes to be discussed. “Signpost” the essay’s key argument, (and, if possible, how this argument is structured).

Introductions are very important as first impressions count and they can create a h alo effect in the mind of the lecturer grading your essay. If you start off well then you are more likely to be forgiven for the odd mistake later one.

Writing a Conclusion

So many students either forget to write a conclusion or fail to give it the attention it deserves.

If there is a word count for your essay try to devote 10% of this to your conclusion.

Ideally the conclusion should summarize the key themes / arguments of your essay. State the take home message – don’t sit on the fence, instead weigh up the evidence presented in the essay and make a decision which side of the argument has more support.

Also, you might like to suggest what future research may need to be conducted and why (read the discussion section of journal articles for this).

Don”t include new information / arguments (only information discussed in the main body of the essay).

If you are unsure of what to write read the essay question and answer it in one paragraph.

Points that unite or embrace several themes can be used to great effect as part of your conclusion.

The Importance of Flow

Obviously, what you write is important, but how you communicate your ideas / arguments has a significant influence on your overall grade. Most students may have similar information / content in their essays, but the better students communicate this information concisely and articulately.

When you have finished the first draft of your essay you must check if it “flows”. This is an important feature of quality of communication (along with spelling and grammar).

This means that the paragraphs follow a logical order (like the chapters in a novel). Have a global structure with themes arranged in a way that allows for a logical sequence of ideas. You might want to rearrange (cut and paste) paragraphs to a different position in your essay if they don”t appear to fit in with the essay structure.

To improve the flow of your essay make sure the last sentence of one paragraph links to first sentence of the next paragraph. This will help the essay flow and make it easier to read.

Finally, only repeat citations when it is unclear which study / theory you are discussing. Repeating citations unnecessarily disrupts the flow of an essay.

Referencing

The reference section is the list of all the sources cited in the essay (in alphabetical order). It is not a bibliography (a list of the books you used).

In simple terms every time you cite/refer to a name (and date) of a psychologist you need to reference the original source of the information.

If you have been using textbooks this is easy as the references are usually at the back of the book and you can just copy them down. If you have been using websites, then you may have a problem as they might not provide a reference section for you to copy.

References need to be set out APA style :

Author, A. A. (year). Title of work . Location: Publisher.

Journal Articles

Author, A. A., Author, B. B., & Author, C. C. (year). Article title. Journal Title, volume number (issue number), page numbers

A simple way to write your reference section is use Google scholar . Just type the name and date of the psychologist in the search box and click on the “cite” link.

Next, copy and paste the APA reference into the reference section of your essay.

Once again, remember that references need to be in alphabetical order according to surname.

Appropriate Behavior Modification Plan

This essay about crafting effective behavior modification plans emphasizes the importance of understanding human behavior’s complexity and tailoring interventions accordingly. It discusses key principles such as reinforcement, antecedents, and consequences, highlighting their role in shaping behavior. Moreover, the essay underscores the significance of considering the broader context, including environmental and social factors, in designing interventions. By adopting a strategic and holistic approach, practitioners can create interventions that foster positive change and growth in individuals.

How it works

In the realm of psychology and education, implementing an effective behavior modification plan is paramount to fostering positive change and growth in individuals. Whether in a classroom setting, therapeutic environment, or organizational context, understanding the nuances of behavior modification is essential for achieving desired outcomes. This essay delves into the intricacies of developing and executing a successful behavior modification plan, exploring key principles, strategies, and considerations.

At the heart of any behavior modification plan lies the understanding that behavior is influenced by a myriad of factors, including environmental, social, and psychological variables.

Recognizing this complexity is fundamental to devising interventions that are tailored to the unique needs and circumstances of the individual or group. One size does not fit all when it comes to behavior modification; instead, interventions must be carefully designed and customized to address specific behaviors and objectives.

Central to the process of behavior modification is the concept of reinforcement. Reinforcement involves the use of consequences to strengthen or weaken a behavior, depending on whether it is desirable or undesirable. Positive reinforcement entails rewarding desired behaviors, thereby increasing the likelihood of their recurrence. Conversely, negative reinforcement involves removing aversive stimuli to encourage desired behaviors. Understanding the principles of reinforcement is key to shaping behavior effectively and sustainably.

In addition to reinforcement, another critical aspect of behavior modification is the identification of antecedents and consequences. Antecedents are events or stimuli that precede a behavior, while consequences are the outcomes that follow it. By carefully analyzing antecedents and consequences, practitioners can gain insights into the triggers and motivations underlying specific behaviors, allowing for targeted interventions. Moreover, modifying antecedents and consequences can help reshape behavior patterns over time.

Furthermore, it is essential to adopt a holistic approach to behavior modification that takes into account the broader context in which behaviors occur. This entails considering environmental factors, social dynamics, cultural influences, and individual differences. By addressing these contextual factors, practitioners can create a supportive and conducive environment for behavior change to occur. Moreover, collaborating with relevant stakeholders, such as family members, educators, or colleagues, can enhance the effectiveness and sustainability of behavior modification efforts.

In conclusion, crafting an effective behavior modification plan requires a nuanced understanding of human behavior, as well as a strategic and systematic approach to intervention. By leveraging principles of reinforcement, analyzing antecedents and consequences, and considering the broader context, practitioners can design interventions that promote positive change and facilitate growth. Ultimately, behavior modification is a dynamic and iterative process that requires ongoing assessment, adaptation, and collaboration. Through thoughtful planning and implementation, behavior modification can empower individuals to achieve their fullest potential and lead fulfilling lives.

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