Educational Psychology's Healthy Growing Pains

Abstract

This article outlines the historical development of educational psychology as a discipline, its current issues and tensions, and new directions that might flow from both its history and current state. In providing this synopsis for students of educational psychology, the article examines how the discipline was originally conceptualized, how current debates are elaborations of previous debates, and how these pressures sustain the field. In an effort to understand what has changed in educational psychology since its formal inception, the article reviews the contents of the first volume of the Journal of Educational Psychology for each decade from 1910 to 1990, as well as the 1999 volume. An interesting pattern that emerges from this inspection of topics is the focus on developing adequate measurement tools before the study of new topics can be fully embraced and pursued. The article concludes that the current debates about methods, purposes, and intended contributions of the field of educational psychology generally reflect a healthy state of its being.