What is educational psychology? An academic definition would perhaps say that educational psychology is the study of learners, learning, and teaching. However, for students who are or expect to be teachers, educational psychology is something more. It is the accumulated knowledge, wisdom, and seat-of-the-pants theory that every teacher should possess to intelligently solve the daily problems of teaching. Educational psychology cannot tell teachers what to do, but it can give them the principles to use in making a good decision and a language to discuss their experiences and thinking.

What makes a good teacher? Is it warmth, humor, and the ability to care about people? Is it planning, hard work, and self-discipline? What about leadership, enthusiasm, a contagious love of learning, and speaking ability? Most people would agree that all of these qualities are needed to make someone a good teacher, and they would certainly be correct. But these qualities are not enough. Subject matter knowledge is important. But effective teachers can also communicate their knowledge to students. The link between what the teacher wants students to learn learning is called instruction, or pedagogy. Effective instruction is a matter of one person with more knowledge transmitting this knowledge to the other.

The teacher's tasks are: motivating students, managing the classroom, assessing prior knowledge, communicating ideas effectively, taking into account the characteristics of the learners, assessing learning outcomes, and reviewing information-must be attended to at all levels of education, in or out of schools.

Can good teaching be taught? The answer is definitely yes. Good teaching has to be observed and practiced, but there are principles of good teaching that teachers need to know, which can then be applied in the classroom. The major components of effective instruction are

• Knowledge of subject and teaching resources
• Critical thinking and problem-solving skills
• Knowledge of students and their learning
• Teaching and communication skills

One attribute seems to be characteristic of outstanding teachers: intentionality. Intentionality means doing things for a reason, on purpose. Intentional teachers are those who are constantly thinking about the outcomes they want for their students and about how each decision they make moves children toward those outcomes. Intentional teachers know that maximum learning does not happen by chance. Yes, children do learn in unplanned ways all the time, and many will learn from even the most chaotic lesson. But to really challenge students, to get their best efforts, to help them make conceptual leaps and organize and retain new knowledge, teachers need to be purposeful, thoughtful, and flexible, without ever losing sight of their goals for every child. In a word, they need to be intentional.

Intentional teachers are constantly asking themselves what goals they and their students are trying to accomplish; whether each portion of their lesson is appropriate to students' background knowledge, skills, and needs; whether each activity or assignment is clearly related to a valued outcome; whether each instructional minute is used wisely and well. An intentional teacher trying to build students' synonym skills during follow-up time might have them work in pairs to master a set of synonyms in preparation for individual quizzes.

Research finds that one of the most powerful predictors of a teacher's impact on students is the belief that what he or she does makes a difference. This belief, called teacher efficacy, is at the heart of what it means to be an intentional teacher. Teachers who believe that success in school is almost entirely due to children's inborn intelligence, home environment, or other factors that teachers cannot influence, are unlikely to teach in the same way as those who believe that their own efforts are the key to children's learning. An intentional teacher, one who has a strong belief in his or her efficacy, is more likely to put forth consistent effort, to persist in the face of obstacles, and to keep trying relentlessly until every student succeeds.

An intentional teacher achieves a sense of efficacy by constantly assessing the results of his or her instruction, constantly trying new strategies if their initial instruction didn't work, and constantly seeking ideas from colleagues, books, magazines, workshops, and other sources to enrich and solidify their teaching skills.

The goal of research in educational psychology is to carefully examine obvious as well as less than obvious questions, using objective methods to test ideas about the factors that contribute to learning. The products of this research are principles, laws, and theories. A principle explains the relationship between factors, such as the effects of alternative grading systems on student motivation. Laws are simply principles that have been thoroughly tested and found to apply in a wide variety of situations. A theory is a set of related principles and laws that explains a broad aspect of learning, behavior, or another area of interest. Without theories the facts and principles that are discovered would be like disorganized specks on a canvas.

Theories tie together these facts and principles to give us the big picture. However, different theorists may interpret the same facts and principles in different ways. As in any science, progress in educational psychology is slow and uneven. A single study is rarely a breakthrough, but over time evidence accumulates on a subject and allows theorists to refine and extend their theories.

It is probably true that the most important things teachers learn, they learn on the job-in internships, while student teaching, or during their first years in the classroom. However, teachers make hundreds of decisions every day and each decision has a theory behind it, whether or not the teacher is aware of it. The quality, accuracy, and usefulness of those theories are what ultimately determine the teacher's success.

Developmental research indicates that as students enter adolescence, the peer group becomes all-important to them, and they try to establish their independence from adult control, often by flouting or ignoring rules. Basic research on behavioral learning theories shows that when a behavior is repeated many times, some reward must be encouraging the behavior, and that if the behavior is to be eliminated, the reward must first be identified and removed. Teachers can use this information to plan effective teaching strategies and avoid being sidetracked by class management issues.

Research in educational psychology not only provides evidence for principles of effective practice, but it also provides evidence about the effectiveness of particular programs or practices. For example, in the vignette at the beginning of this chapter, Leah Washington was using a specific approach to creative writing instruction that has been extensively evaluated as a whole. In other words, there is evidence that, on average, children whose teachers are using such methods learn to write better than those whose teachers use more traditional approaches.

There is evidence on the effectiveness of dozens of widely used programs, from methods in particular subjects to strategies for reforming entire schools. An intentional teacher should be aware of research on programs for his or her subject and grade level, and should seek out professional development opportunities to learn methods known to make a difference for children.

Many researchers and educators have bemoaned the limited impact of research in educational psychology on teachers' practices. Indeed, research in education has nowhere near as great an impact on practice as research in medicine or agriculture or engineering. Yet research in education does have a profound indirect impact on educational practice, even if teachers are not aware of it. It affects educational policies, professional development programs, and teaching materials. It is important for educators to become intelligent consumers of research, not to take every finding or every expert's pronouncement as truth from Mount Olympus.

How do we know what we know in educational psychology? As in any scientific field, knowledge comes from many sources. Sometimes researchers study schools, teachers, or students as they are, and sometimes they create special programs, or treatments, and study their effects on one or more variables (anything that can have more than one value, such as age, sex, achievement level, or attitudes). There is no one best or most useful approach to research; any method can be useful when applied to the right set of questions. The principal methods educational researchers use to learn about schools, teachers, students, and instruction are experiments, correlational studies, and descriptive research.

In an experiment, researchers can create special treatments and analyze their effects. In one classic study, Lepper, Greene, and Nisbett (1973) set up an experimental situation in which children used felt-tipped markers to draw pictures. Children in the experimental group (the group that receives a treatment) were given a prize (a "good player award") for drawing pictures. Children in a control group received no prizes. At the end of the experiment, all students were allowed to choose among various activities, including drawing with felt-tipped markers. The children who had received the prizes chose to continue drawing with felt-tipped markers about half as frequently as did those who had not received prizes. This result was interpreted as showing that rewarding individuals for doing a task they already liked could reduce their interest in doing the task when they were no longer rewarded.

The Lepper study illustrates several important aspects of experiments. First, the children were randomly assigned to receive prizes or not. For example, the children's names might have been put on slips of paper that were dropped into a hat and then drawn at random for assignment to a "prize" or "no-prize" group. Random assignment ensured that the two groups were essentially equivalent before the experiment began. This equivalence is critical, because if we were not sure that the two groups were equal before the experiment, we would not be able to tell whether it was the prizes that made the difference in their subsequent behavior.

A second feature of the above study that is characteristic of experiments is that everything other than the treatment itself (the prizes) was kept the same for the prize, and no-prize groups. The children played in the same rooms with the same materials and with the same adults present. The researcher who gave the prize spent the same amount of time watching the no-prize children draw. Only the prize itself was different for the two groups. The goal was to be sure that it was the treatment, not some other factor, which explained the difference between the two groups.

The Lepper study is an example of a laboratory experiment. Even though the experiment took place in a school building, the researchers created a highly artificial, structured setting that existed for a very brief period of time. The advantage of laboratory experiments is that they permit researchers to exert a very high degree of control over all the factors involved in the study. Such studies are high in internal validity, which is to say that we can confidently attribute any differences they find to the treatments themselves (rather than to other factors). The primary limitation of laboratory experiments is that they are typically so artificial and so brief that their results may have little relevance to real-life situations. For example, the Lepper study, which was later repeated several times, was used to support a theory that rewards can diminish individuals' interest in an activity when the rewards are withdrawn. This theory served as the basis for attacks on the use of classroom rewards, such as grades and stars. However, later research in real classrooms using real rewards has generally failed to find such effects. This finding does not discredit the Lepper and colleagues study; it does show that theories based on artificial laboratory experiments cannot be assumed to apply to all situations in real life but must be tested in the real settings.

The randomized field experiment, in which instructional programs or other practical treatments are evaluated over relatively long periods in realistic conditions, is often used in educational research. Randomized field experiments are very difficult to do in education, as it is rare that teachers are willing to be assigned by chance to one group or another. For this reason, field experiments more often use matching, in which teachers or schools using one method would be matched with those using a different method, or a control group. Matching is much more practical than random assignment, but its results must be carefully interpreted, since there may be reasons that one group of educators took on one method while another group did not.

In single-case experiments, a single student's behavior may be observed for several days. Then a special program is begun, and the student's behavior under the new program is observed. Finally, the new program is withdrawn. If the student's behavior improves under the special program but the improvement disappears when the program is withdrawn, the implication is that the program has affected the student's behavior. Sometimes the "single case" can be several students, or a whole class.

Perhaps the most frequently used research method in education is the correlational study. In contrast to an experiment, in which the researcher deliberately changes one variable to see how this change will affect the other variables, in correlational research the researcher studies variables as they are to see whether they are related. Variables can be positively correlated, negatively correlated, or uncorrelated. An example of a positive correlation is the relationship between reading achievement and mathematics achievement. In general, someone better than average in reading will also be better than average in math. When one variable is high, the other tends also to be high. An example of a negative correlation is days absent and grades. The more days a student is absent, the lower his or her grades will tend to be.

The principal disadvantage of correlational methods is that while they may tell us that two variables are related, they do not tell us what causes what. Indeed, correlation does not imply causation-this is a frequent pitfall for novice researchers.

Experimental and correlational research looks for relationships between variables. However, some research in educational psychology simply seeks to describe something of interest. One type of descriptive research is a survey or interview. Another, called ethnography, involves observation of a social setting (such as a classroom or school) over an extended period. Descriptive research usually does not have the scientific objectivity of correlational or experimental research, but it makes up for this lack in richness of detail and interpretation.

Developmental psychologists use descriptive research extensively to identify characteristics of children at different ages. The Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, who began by carefully observing his own children, did the most important research in developmental psychology. As a result of his observations, he developed a theory that describes the cognitive development of children from infancy through adolescence.

Action research is a particular form of descriptive research that is carried out by educators in their own classrooms or schools. In action research, a teacher or principal might try out a new teaching method or school organization strategy, collect information about how it worked, and communicate this information to others. Because the people involved in the experiment are the educators themselves, action research lacks the objectivity sought in other forms of research, but it can provide deeper insight from front-line teachers or administrators than would be possible in research done by outsiders.

To teach in the public school system, it is necessary to obtain a license or certificate. The state requirements vary but all states require graduation from a four-year college with some specialized classes in teacher preparation. Although requirements are sometimes similar, there are many unique requirements also, especially in the area of licensure tests and alternative certification requirements. Continuing professional development is one of the basic requirements considered to be an ongoing one. Experience teachers find that teaching is a professional service that requires continuous updating. In this updating and sharing of information among their colleagues and/or the educational professional community, teachers become "educational researchers" as they critically examine their own practice, testing, and various strategies to help students learn.