Education is a rather specific area of human activity as it is responsible for preparing the younger generations of people for living and working in human society. Education is first of all work with people, and understanding the peculiarities of every person involved in the educational process provides for its success (Woods, Wood, Boyd, 2007). Thus, human psychology is of great help to education in this respect, and Ediger (2000) shows in his article that educational psychology is a powerful tool that facilitates the development of the educational system in the US and the rest of the world.
The very article under analysis concerns the topic of the importance of psychology for the educational process. Ediger (2000) stresses the importance of understanding of psychological peculiarities of every student for the teachers. The author argues that to become a successful teacher, especially of social sciences, a person has to consider the needs of every student taking into account the possible differences in intelligence levels, skills acquired, and the potential for learning. If all these aspects are considered, the teacher becomes able to control the attention of students and make the study process interesting and involving for them.
Such an approach is an innovative one, and it is, at the same time, one of the strong points of this article. Ediger (2000) not only criticizes the teachers who try to work with the whole class using generalizing techniques, but he also offers solutions as well. The clearly outlined steps that teachers should take to succeed in classes with different students allow the readers of the article to understand that psychology plays a really important role in education. Ediger (2000) singles out 5 psychological principles that allow teachers to involve as many students as possible in the study. The author states that classes should be interesting, meaningful to every single student, involving, and displaying gradually growing complexity of the material. Given that these principles are kept to, the teacher succeeds in understanding the psychological peculiarities of every student in the class and might hope for the class’ highest efficiency.
However, the weaknesses can also be observed in the article by Ediger (2000). First of all, the rather narrow scope of the study speaks for itself as the author considers teachers of social studies exclusively thus not allowing the readers to make generalizations. Further on, the quite small number of references evidence that either research on the topic of educational psychology has been carried not enough by other scholars or Ediger (2000) has carried his own research not sufficiently enough. Drawing from this, the lacking theoretical basis of the article does not allow making generalizing conclusions as to the probability of other opinions expressed by others, not considered by Ediger (2000), scholars still remain.
Nevertheless, the overall impression made by the article is positive. It is strictly focused on the topic of educational psychology for social studies teachers and presents a considerable amount of scholarly evidence to prove the points made by the author. The article by Ediger (2000) has its strong and weak points but the former dominate and allows making the conclusion about the professional validity and high quality of the scholarly research work by Marlow Ediger. The author not only criticizes the existing state of things but also suggests his solutions to the problem which adds greatly to the usefulness and credibility of the article.
References
- Ediger, M. (2000). Psychology in Teaching the Social Studies. Journal of Instructional Psychology, 27(1), 28.
- Woods, S. E., Wood, E. G., & Boyd, D. (2007). The World of Psychology. 6th Edition. Allyn & Bacon.