psicologia

The role of educational psychology in teacher education: expert opinions on what teachers should know about learning, development and assessment
Hendrik Lohse – Bossenz * Olga Kunina – Habenicht * Mareike Kunter
Publicado el 22 de febrero del 2013
Instituto superior de psicología aplicada, Lisboa, Portugal
Abstract: the aim of this study is to identify psychological topics within theáreas of learning, development, and assesment, that are especially important for teachers and should be inlcuded in the university teacher education curriculum. Based on the observation that teacher educators in psychology often face the challenge of having to select certain topics from a large body of possible content, at the risk of causing large variation of knowledge between teachers, we asked 48experts from different fields of teacher education ( psychologists, non - psychologists at university and educators from the induction phase) to evaluate psychological topics with respect to their important to teaching. In the following two rounds (Delphi metod), experts selected topics wich they felt should be taught at university. Although differences existed at the beginning, a ranking oftopics was obtained. Further, we explored th way experts with different backgrounds achieved consensus to support the validity and acceptance of the results with a focus on the acquisition of psychological knowledge for teachers and to foster the position of educational psychology within teacher education.
Keywords: teacher education – educational psychology – curriculum – Delphi study – expert panelImagine you are a newly employed assistant profesor at a school of education or teacher- educating university and you are asked to give a lectura in educational psychology or, more specifically, on psychological aspects of learning in the classroom. To develop your syllabus, you may consult different sources: standards that are part of some certification process either for individual teachercandidates or for teacher education programs in general; textbooks that either cover educational psychology as a broad science or are more focused on learning; or finally, some of your colleagues pre-existing syllabi. You will surely be confronted with an overwhelming amount of content which might be more or less detailed and sooner or later you may very likely come to the conclusión that youcannot know for sure whether your agenda covers the essential content teacher candidates should acquire in order to successfully manage their daily work (i.e., fostering learning in their students).
The argument put forward in this study is available sources to discuss a possible curriculum, such as standards or recent research literature, define the relevant content for beginning teachers toobroadly for practical use. For example, woolfolk – hoy (2000) defines five áreas of educational psychological knowledge relevant for teachers (e.g., different teaching methods, communication skills, etc.). Obviously, these áreas span a lot of topics which are elaborated on in numerous textbooks. However, as the time within a course is limited, educators have to decide which topics should be included inthe course. Many debates about a curriculum for teacher education are located on the more general level of áreas (e.g., Anderson et al. 1995; Patrick et al. 2011) and textbooks can be too detailed (e.g., Kiewra and Gubbels 1997; woolfolk Hoy 1996, 2000), since to date sparse guidelines exist that state which specific topics (e.g., information processing, self – efficacy, or Bandura’s sociallearning) are relevant for teachers to, for example, support learning in the classroom.
The aim of this study, therefore, is to empirically determine topics within general conten áreas (i.e., learning, development, and assesment) in a Delphi study whit experts in teacher education. By specifying broad content áreas with concrete topics, we can contribute essentially to the development of syllabi...