Recently through my university, I received a job advert for an Assistant Educational Psychologist position starting in September with the only experience requirement being that you have worked at least one year full-time with children. This was perfect for me because I’ve been working with children and young people part-time for six years, so I will definitely be applying to this position next week. However, my understanding of educational psychology is very surface level, so in case I become an educational psychologist, it would be very useful to have a greater understanding of educational psychology. Therefore, in this careers in psychology podcast episode, you’ll learn what is educational psychology, what do educational psychologists do, what are the potential careers within educational psychology and more. If you enjoy learning about psychology careers, applied psychology and the psychology of learning then this will be a great episode for you.
Today’s psychology podcast episode has been sponsored by Retrieval-Based Learning. Available from all major eBook retailers and you can order the paperback and hardback copies from Amazon, your local bookstore and local library, if you request it. Also available as an AI-narrated audiobook from selected audiobook platforms and library systems. For example, Kobo, Spotify, Barnes and Noble, Google Play, Overdrive, Baker and Taylor and Bibliotheca.
What Is Educational Psychology?
Educational psychology is the empirical study of how we learn and retain information. This area of psychology mainly focuses on the learning processes in early childhood as well as adolescence, but as learning is lifelong, it can focus on adults too. Also, it’s important to bear in mind that even though educational psychology sounds like it only focuses on education settings, learning takes place through life experiences like the home, family, friends, work, culture and through social media. Therefore, educational psychology investigates how learning can occur in all these different situations.
Furthermore, when it comes to educational psychologists, these psychologists study the biological, cognitive, social and emotional factors that underpin learning as well as deepen our understanding of individual learning styles, the importance of learning environments and instructional strategies. The entire point of educational psychology is to help people learn in the best way possible.
Educational psychologists can specialise in children with specific learning difficulties or neurodevelopmental conditions. As well as educational psychologists can develop teaching methods to help students reach their full potential in schools.
I know the Assistant Educational Psychologist position that I’m going to apply for focuses on working with children with autism and specific learning difficulties. Whereas, a woman I used to know she did work experience in an educational psychology role helping to do assessments for children with special educational needs and she loved it.
What Topics Can Educational Psychologists Study?
If you want to become an educational psychologist, there are a lot of different topics and areas you could work in and study. For example, you could work in organisational learning where you study how people learn in organisational settings like the workplace. I think this sounds great to some extent because if you have a burning passion for business psychology but you’re interested in learning too then this is a great way to combine both topics. Also, this just goes to show how psychology can constantly be combined and applied in so many unexpected ways. I never would have thought to combine learning and the workplace.
Another topic you could study as an educational psychologist is educational technology by looking at how different types of technology can help students learn. I would add that you could see what types of technology improves people’s ability to learn the best. I imagine that for some people artificial intelligence could be useful but other learners might find virtual reality more useful. It is a random idea but those are the sort of fun experiments and research questions you could investigate in educational psychology.
In addition, educational psychologists can work in instructional design so they research how to effectively design learning materials for different students based on their learning style, their age, their cognitive development and whether or not they have any special educational needs.
Personally, a small part of me would not mind working in this area. It definitely wouldn’t be my “forever” job, but I think it would be interesting to see how this works in more depth. Also, I do have experience in this area because as part of being a Postgraduate Ambassador for my university, I’ve already developed age-appropriate materials for students at different ages and that is a lot of fun.
The final three options, that we’ll look at in this podcast episode (but there are more available in the real world) are educational psychologists could be involved in curriculum development by creating coursework that maximises a person’s ability to learn. As well as they can work with gifted learners so educational psychologists can support learners who are identified as gifted. Lastly, psychologists can work with children and young people with special educational needs by providing them with specialised instructions.
This is something I’ve seen a few times in the real world. Especially, during my work experience with an NHS learning disability team because I went to a college that had a centre for people with special educational needs. And it was useful to see how staff spoke, broke down tasks and interacted with each student. It’s hard to explain briefly in a paragraph but it was useful to see how instructions needed to be adapted so the student could effectively understand what was being asked of them.
What Psychological Perspectives Does Educational Psychology Draw On?
Like most of psychology, educational psychology draws on a lot of psychological theories, research and practices from other areas of psychology. For example, educational psychology draws on theories and research from behavioural psychology, developmental psychology, cognitive psychology and more. At the time of writing, within educational psychology, there are five main schools of thought, which we’ll look at in more depth in a moment. These are cognitivism, behaviourism, constructivism, social contextual learning theories and experientialism.
It's important to be aware of each of these main perspectives because each one has their own focus on specific factors that influence a person’s learning ability. Whether this is through influences on experiences, behaviours, emotions, thoughts and more.
What Is The Cognitive Perspective In Educational Psychology?
The cognitive perspective has become one of the most widespread theories in educational psychology because it accounts for a wide range of different factors that impact learning. For example, the cognitive perspective accounts for the effects of thinking, memory formation, information processing and more unlike the other perspectives. Therefore, in learning and cognitive psychology, this perspective focuses on how constructs, like emotions, motivations, individual perspectives and beliefs impact the learning process. Then this cognitive theory is supported by the idea that a person learns because of their own intrinsic motivation that has nothing to do with external rewards as a behaviourist would see learning.
More on that in a moment.
As a result, educational psychologists use the cognitive perspective to understand what motivates children and young people to learn, how they problem solve, how children remember what they’ve learnt amongst other topics.
What is The Behaviourist Perspective In Educational Psychology?
Our second perspective proposes that all of our behaviours are learnt through conditioning, like negative reinforcement. Behavioural psychologists who believe in the behaviourist perspective firmly rely on the principles of operant conditioning to explain how learning happens. In essence, behaviourism suggests that teachers reward students with tokens or another desirable outcome or stimulus and this motivates the students to learn. Also, if the teacher punishes a student for doing bad behaviour then the student learns not to do that in the future.
Within educational psychology, behaviourism is understood to be somewhat useful with the idea of rewarding students teaches them good behaviour. Yet behaviourism has thankfully been heavily criticised for not acknowledging or taking into account for the internal psychological motivations of a child or young person. Like, intrinsic motivation, emotions as well as attitudes.
Personally, I’m a good example of why the behaviourist approach isn’t completely right, because I love learning about psychology, I love podcasting and learning everything I possibly can. Not because a teacher is rewarding me for learning about psychology, but because this brings me joy, it is my passion and I would hate not to learn about psychology and other topics.
What is The Developmental Perspective In Educational Psychology?
Just like Developmental Psychology, the developmental perspective investigates how our biology, cognitive, social and emotional development impacts our learning throughout the lifespan. Therefore, in an educational psychology context, this helps us to understand how children and young people learn new knowledge and skills as they grow up and develop.
Personally, as much as I flat out hate the “nature versus nurture” debate because research clearly shows most behaviours are a mixture of the two with one type of factor being the dominant influence and the other being a smaller factor but still influencing the behaviour. When it comes to educational psychology, there is still a focus on the impact of nature versus nurture on the learning process. For instance, as the brain develops so does a child’s capacity to learn, remember and problem solve. These are the biological factors. Yet at the same time, there are nurture and environmental factors impacting the child’s ability to learn too from their life experiences with peers, teachers, parents, family and other important people in their life.
A good theory to look at here is Jean Piaget’s stages of cognitive development model that explains how children grow intellectually throughout childhood. You can read more about this theory and more in Developmental Psychology: A Guide To Developmental and Child Psychology.
On the whole, educational psychologists use the developmental perspective to understand how children think at different stages of their development so they can better understand what children are capable of learning at each developmental stage. In turn, this helps educators to create instructional materials and methods that are appropriate for each age group.
What Is The Experiential Perspective In Educational Psychology?
The experiential perspective focuses on how a person’s life experiences impact how they learn and understand new information. In addition, this perspective considers emotions, feelings and experiences similar to the cognitive and constructivist perspectives too. Then this perspective helps educational psychologists to understand how learners find personal meaning in their education instead of feeling that the information doesn’t apply to them.
In case you don’t think this is important to understand because you believe children and young people think everything that they learn is important to them. Just think about your maths lessons as a child, how many times did you sit in algebra wondering when you were going to use it? It was only last night I was having a conversation with a friend about how useless algebra was, and she disagreed with me. And I don’t really remember much about algebra because I didn’t think it applied to me.
As educators, this reaction from students is the last thing that we want.
This was something I learnt during my pedagogical training through my university for my postgraduate ambassador job. Due to one of the 4 pedagogical outcomes is “value of learning” so it’s important to show students that what they're learning is relevant and important to them as well as they can use it in the real world. This helps to improve engagement and it shows them they should focus and remember what they learnt today.
In my psychology content for my university, I’ve included short sections at the end and throughout my content that remind students why this is important and why they should value what they’re learning today.
What is The Constructivist Perspective In Educational Psychology?
The constructivist approach is definitely an area of psychology I need to learn more about because I flat out love how this approach accounts for the role of social and cultural influences on our behaviour. In this case, our learning behaviour. As a result, someone who believes in the constructivist approach proposes that what a person already knows significantly influences how they will learn new information. In other words, new knowledge can only be added to and understood in terms of existing knowledge with this perspective relying heavily on the work of Lev Vygotsky with his ideas on the zone of proximal development as well as instructional scaffolding.
In my opinion, I largely agree with this theory because last week is a good example of this. Since I live and breathe clinical psychology through my lectures, my books and my podcast, I can largely walk into any psychology lecture and understand and learn a lot of information. I make links between what I currently know and the new information that I am learning in the lecture. Whereas last week, I went to my housemates’ second year atomic physics lecture and I did not understand any of it whatsoever. It was talking about the periodic table but that was all I understood because I didn’t have any past information besides what I learnt at GCSE (when I was 16 years old). I couldn’t learn or remember any of this atomic physics information because I had no preexisting knowledge.
What Are Educational Psychology Careers?
If you like the sound of educational psychology then there are a lot of potential career options for you. For example, the majority of educational psychologists work directly in schools because some psychologists are teachers but other educational psychologists help teachers try new learning methods as well as develop new course content.
Another career option as an educational psychologist is to work in academic research where you conduct research on different topics within learning. Or you could work in administration where you can influence education methods and help students learn in the best possible way for them.
A final career option within education psychology is to become a counsellor where you directly help students cope with any barriers to the learning that they face.
Lastly, for this section, to be able to become an educational psychologist you need to have a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree as well as if you want to work in school administration or at a university then you might need a doctorate. If you’re a UK listener then at the time of writing, the Doctorate of Educational Psychology is fully funded.
Careers In Psychology Conclusion
Personally, because I do a lot of work in schools through my university’s Outreach department as a student ambassador, I often think about working in school directly as a psychologist. This is one of the reasons why I’m interested in applying for the Assistant Educational Psychologist position because it’s interesting, it will allow me to work in education (a place where I feel really comfortable) and it means I can continue to work with children.
Which is interesting because when I was younger and even a few years ago, I never would have said I wanted to work with children and young people. Yet now, I almost couldn’t imagine not working with children, because students have been a big and very positive part of my life for the past six years.
Ultimately, I would love to work directly in schools as an educational psychologist with a clinical focus. Since before this podcast episode, the only real information I had about educational psychology was that there were two types. A clinical educational psychologist and a research educational psychologist.
To wrap up today’s episode, educational psychology offers us a lot of exciting opportunities to understand how people learn and the different factors that play an important role in informing teaching methods as well as educational strategies. Due to educational psychology explores the learning processing through examining different areas of learning behaviour like how developmental, cognitive, social, emotional amongst other factors impact learning.
Then this can all be applied to different areas of education like educational technology, special education, curriculum design and more.
If you want to work with children and young people, make a difference and contribute to education as a whole then becoming an educational psychologist could be perfect for you. Therefore, here are some questions to think at the end of this episode:
· Does educational psychology interest you?
· Would you want to work in education and make a difference?
· What area of educational psychology excites you?
· Is there anything holding you back from exploring educational psychology in more depth?
If you want to learn more, please check out:
Retrieval-Based Learning. Available from all major eBook retailers and you can order the paperback and hardback copies from Amazon, your local bookstore and local library, if you request it. Also available as an AI-narrated audiobook from selected audiobook platforms and library systems. For example, Kobo, Spotify, Barnes and Noble, Google Play, Overdrive, Baker and Taylor and Bibliotheca.
Have a great day.
Careers In Psychology Psychology References and Further Reading
Borich, G. D., & Tombari, M. L. (2021). Educational psychology: A contemporary approach.
Černý, M. (2023). Educational psychology aspects of learning with chatbots without artificial intelligence: Suggestions for designers. European journal of investigation in health, psychology and education, 13(2), 284-305.
Gillham, B. (Ed.). (2022). Reconstructing educational psychology. Routledge.
Hornstra, L., Mathijssen, A. S., Denissen, J. J., & Bakx, A. (2023). Academic motivation of intellectually gifted students and their classmates in regular primary school classes: A multidimensional, longitudinal, person-and variable-centered approach. Learning and Individual Differences, 107, 102345.
Locke, J., & John, J. A. S. (2024). Some thoughts on education. BoD–Books on Demand.
MacLeod, A., Burm, S., & Mann, K. (2022). Constructivism: learning theories and approaches to research. Researching medical education, 25-40.
Molina Roldán, S., Marauri, J., Aubert, A., & Flecha, R. (2021). How inclusive interactive learning environments benefit students without special needs. Frontiers in psychology, 12, 661427.
Roediger, H. L. (2013). Applying Cognitive Psychology to Education: Translational Educational Science. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 1-3.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1529100612454415 (Original work published 2013)
Sepp, S., Wong, M., Hoogerheide, V., & Castro‐Alonso, J. C. (2022). Shifting online: 12 tips for online teaching derived from contemporary educational psychology research. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 38(5), 1304-1320.
Siann, G., & Ugwuegbu, D. C. (2024). Educational psychology in a changing world. Taylor & Francis.
Woolfolk, A. (2016). Educational psychology. Pearson.
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