EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY

Educational Psychology

Educational Psychology

Introduction

Since the inception of the field of educational psychology in the early 1900s, researchers have focused on attention, memory, teaching, and learning, and on experimental approaches to these topics (Berliner, 2003). While much of the seminal research in the field has been conducted on European-American subjects, and the literature reflects this focus, interest in African Americans has waxed and waned at various times over the last one hundred years. Key topics of research with regard to African Americans have included the differential performance of blacks and whites on intelligence tests and, more recently, the black-white gap in academic achievement and ways of promoting school success among African-American students.

Discussion

Early in the last century, in an emerging debate on what was then called "Negro education," scholars argued about the educability of people of African descent, questioning whether they were innately inferior in intelligence. Edward Thorndike, the founder of educational psychology, and his students stressed the importance of educational measurement (Berliner, 2003). Using intelligence (IQ) tests originally developed in France and adapted for U.S. populations, researchers sought to determine intelligence "scientifically." In 1913 A. C. Strong published one of the first studies that purported to show hereditarily determined racial differences in intelligence. This was the beginning of a series of studies that would be used to justify claims of mental inferiority of African Americans.

Horace Mann Bond, an African-American educator and researcher, and other African-American social scientists in the 1920s were instrumental in refuting many of these claims. Bond used findings from intelligence tests administered to white soldiers by the U.S (Hilliard, 1996). Army to argue against racial explanations for differences in intelligence. The median score of white soldiers from four southern states corresponded to the mental age of a twelve-and-a-half-year-old child; northern white soldiers on average scored higher. Such variations within a single racial group showed, according to Bond, that intelligence tests are less a measure of innate ability than a measure of such factors as environment and education (Hilliard, 1996).

From the 1930s through the 1960s hereditary explanations for differences in intelligence largely fell out of favor. Psychologists argued that there were intractable problems in the design of intelligence tests, including failure to control for the influence of subjects' economically unequal backgrounds. Moreover, they argued, the meaning of the test scores was debatable. And the validity of race as a scientific category was increasingly coming into question.

Instead, scholarly attention turned to the influence of environment on intelligence. As detailed in recent work by James Banks, the educational and social science theories, concepts, and research of the early 1960s depicted African Americans as culturally deprived. Scholars favoring the cultural deprivation or "culture of poverty" paradigm posited that low-income populations lacked the socialization experiences that would enable them to acquire the knowledge (Hale, 2001), skills, and attitudes of the middle class. Though these skills and attitudes were rarely measured, educational reform driven by this ideology aimed to transform many of the early socialization experiences of "disadvantaged" ...