“There is nothing so practical as a good theory”: How to let it work in practice (the case of Galperin’s theory)

Abstract

IntroductionIf we consider teachers, trainers, and instructors as the consumers of psycholo­gical knowledge, we may ask this question: What type of psychology do practi­tioners need? Certainly, they are not in need of general speculations; rather, they need concrete information about the psychology of learning, development, and in­struction, information that can become the core of their practical activity. Recent educational practice has created a real challenge for psychology: the challenge of providing knowledge that is sensitive to the heterogeneity and complexity of the social context in which learning processes take place while at the same time of­fering to the teacher sufficiently concrete and clear psychological descriptions both of students and of learning/teaching processes and contents. Without answering such a challenge, researchers wonder why teachers and school administrators do not want to use their remarkable and sometimes outstanding ideas, theories, and models, while teachers and school administrators (together with the general pub­lic) wonder why researchers are not capable of providing them with practical, use­ful knowledge, expressed in an acceptable and understandable form, that can be applied to everyday schooling activities. More than thirty years ago, Snelbecker (1987) published a menu of teachers' justifications for not using educational psy­chologists' and instructional designers' prescriptions in their everyday professional activity. Evaluating the possibilities of instructional-design blueprints, several teachers claimed that they were already on their own practicing what was recom­mended by scientists. Other teachers, while acknowledging the innovative nature of scientific recommendations, still doubted the practical possibility of applying the recommendations in their own classrooms. Snelbecker found that statements such as these were the most common among teachers : don't need any help in teach­ing/training am already doing what you advise if I use that theory, I'll have to change my teaching methods completely already know those theories.It is not easy to get practitioners to accept a system of conditions for applying scientific knowledge. Creating such conditions would mean giving teachers, train­ers, instructors the possibility of obtaining more explanation about and practice with that knowledge than they can obtain on the basis of common sense or their own practical experience alone. It means discovering a general proce­dure that would not only enable the users to analyze many concrete instructional situations according to the findings of modem psychology (in particular, learning and developmental psychology) but would also encourage them to do it. In other words, it is necessary to offer a sort of intellectual tool that practitioners can use to increase their competence in using instructional technologies. This instrument has to be multifunctional and universal. It should direct the attention of the users to changes in and development of the constructive activity of a learner and to focus the users' attention on the mental, internal components of any learning activity. On the procedural (technological) level, such an approach must operate sufficiently so as not to be simply a set of speculative declarations of good intentions. Thus, ap­plied psycho-educational theory requires a strict and simultaneously more explicit form of psychological knowledge. In other words, it requires non-metaphoric de­scriptions of the variables (structural, functional, and developmental) that are most essential and that determine the effectiveness and efficiency of learning/teaching processes as well as a description of the interrelations of those variables. In addi­tion, a detailed and, again, non-metaphoric and unambiguous description of the psychologically grounded conditions that should be present within schooling en­vironments should be offered. Such descriptions must encompass the whole of the schooling situation and the complexity of the processes and phenomena involved. …