Educational Psychology

Educational Psychology is designed to cover five broad topics: development, learning, lesson and classroom management, assessment and characteristics of learners. The development component focuses on developmental theories of cognition and affect as they relate to education. The learning component presents behavioral and cognitive perspectives on learning, problem solving, critical-thinking and reasoning. The classroom management component focuses on the evaluation of learner characterisitics to include those with exceptionalities and ethnically diverse learners. Topics may include the definition of a reflective teacher; cognitive, personal, gender, social, and moral development; individual and group differences; behavioral and cognitive approaches to learning and thinking; motivation and instruction; and assessment. This course provides basic knowledge from the discipline of psychology as related to the field of education and application of this basic knowledge to improve the quality and outcome of the educational process.