Educational psychology is a broad field characterized by the study of individuals in educational settings and how they develop and learn. It incorporates information from such sub-disciplines such as developmental psychology, human development across the life span, curriculum and instruction, motivation, and measurement and assessment. It has evolved to become a field that increasingly focuses on individual differences without any regard to age thereby leading to interests in topics such as (early) intervention, long distance learning, educational technology, adult education, and theories of human development among others. Neil Salkind has mined the rich and extensive backlist of SAGE education and psychology journals to pull together a collection of almost a 100 articles to be the definitive research resource on education psychology.

Section I: Human Growth and ...

Editor's Introduction

NeilJ.Salkind

If you walk into almost any educational setting or institution, you will see a variety of activities taking place, ranging perhaps from an early intervention program for very young children to traditional classroom teaching, to reviewing students’ work via a distance learning activity, and more.

In the most general sense, the focus of educational psychology is the scientific basis of what occurs in these, and many other, settings. Educational psychology is a broad combination of the study of many disciplines, which together has the goal of better understanding the processes through which change takes place in such settings and how scientists, teachers, researchers and practitioners (and these categories are surely mutually inclusive of one another) can help facilitate that change.

As a discipline, educational psychology might ...

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