Preface

Twenty-five years have now elapsed since Educational Psychology: A Developmental Approach first appeared. At the time of its publication in 1974, it represented a radical departure from existing educational psychology texts, all of which seemed to us to fall into one of three categories: outdated, exclusively scientific, or solely educationist.

The Developmental Approach
Our choice of a developmental perspective as a means of giving theoretical coherence to our new text was motivated by both professional and personal considerations. From a professional standpoint, the research of such giants as lean Piaget, Lawrence Kohlberg, and David Hunt was captivating the minds of teachers and researchers across the country. Closer to home two young professors were raising five children between their two families. It was not hard to become a developmentalist when we both saw growth and change almost every day.
The problem we faced as authors of an educational psychology text was how to reconcile the older, more traditional views of the field with our new developmental framework. No easy task. After all, schools of thought such as behaviorism, individual differences, instructional theory, and trait/factor psychology had long traditions that we simply couldn't ignore. What we found, and we're still working on this problem, was that the developmental framework is large enough to comprehend much what previous theory had to offer. For example, it is obvious that at a particular stage of development, a behaviorist approach is quite appropriate both for instruction and classroom management. Similarly, at a different level, the concepts and practices of social psychology come into play. In short, the developmental framework helps identify students' strengths, needs and current problem-solving strategies and becomes the basis for choosing among various instructional strategies. This matching of needs and strategies is followed by a constructive mismatch procedure to facilitate student growth. ...