Students’ Priorities as Authors of Their Own Text about

Educational Psychology

 

By Kelvin Seifert, University of Manitoba

Paper to be presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Diego, California, April 2009. Please address correspondence to Dr. Kelvin Seifert, Faculty of Education, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada R3T 2N2, or email at seifert@cc.umanitoba.ca.

 

Abstract

In this study the feasibility and educational value of students’ writing their own textbook was explored for a particular course in which commercial textbooks had become a normal feature. The course itself was about introductory educational psychology—a common requirement for preservice teachers in training. In lieu of buying a commercial text, students developed a Table of Contents for two editions of their own text, posted and edited sections of chapters, and assessed the results. Although the resulting books were shorter than major commercial textbooks and obviously lacked their “production features,” they offered important clues to students’ educational priorities. Both in choosing topics to write and in reading each other’s work, students emphasized certain topics (for example, special education and classroom management) more than did authors of commercial texts, and they reduced coverage of other conventional topics (for example, instructional planning and assessment of learning). Overall, the results suggested educational advantages to students’ writing their own textbooks, as well as areas where commercial publishers can make their content priorities more relevant and motivating.

Introduction

For reasons ranging from economics to beliefs about education, many university courses have relied on major commercial textbooks as a reference for students and an organizer of the course (Apple, 1987; Nicholls, 2005; Sewall, 2005). Generally the textbooks are well-organized, and authors make every effort to write clearly. When the texts concern professional subjects, they often also provide practical advice and examples intended to reflect professional practice realistically. The choice of content, advice, and examples is usually made by authors and reviewers of early drafts of the textbook, who may or may not be practicing professionals. It is assumed that these people have had experience as teachers, or at least understand teachers’ typical experiences, regardless of how long ago their experiences may have occurred. Rarely is the development of a textbook influenced directly by the ultimate consumers of the text, the students themselves. Whatever its pedagogical merits, the development strategy is convenient for publishers because it means that texts are tailored most directly to those who control sales (i.e. instructors of courses), rather than by those who primarily pay for and read the books (students).

While these assumptions may be adequate for some fields of university study, they do not seem equally plausible for all. A case in point is preservice teacher education and the teaching of one of its common elements, introductory educational psychology. This course is not only required in most teacher education programs, but also commonly uses a comprehensive, commercially produced textbook. The major texts range from 600 to 800 pages and are organized into over 300 hundred topics and subtopics (see for example, Woolfolk, 2009; Snowman, McCown, & Biehler, 2009; Slavin, 2009; and Ormrod, 2008; among others). The general topics are organized in ways that are highly similar across texts and in this way predictable (Seifert, 2006). A cursory review of the table of contents of almost any current textbook about educational psychology shows one or two chapters about human development, major learning theories, motivation, assessment of learning, and social diversity. Many, but not all, also contain chapters about instructional planning and special education. The similarity of topics across books suggests that authors take cues from each other’s books when developing their own, even if authors themselves sometimes gloss over or deny doing so (Ormrod, 2006; Woolfolk, 2008). Where differences exist, they have relatively little to do with selection of topics. They are more often about style of presentation (e.g. more “personal” or first-person in tone versus less personal), or to a lesser extent about thoroughness of presentation within particular topics (Navarro, 2006).

As a group, therefore, textbooks about educational psychology share important qualities in common. Among shared attributes that are positive, the texts are thorough and comprehensive; they attempt to present balanced accounts of issues and controversies; they attempt to identify information or ideas of broad or universal relevance; and they present ideas in accessible language. But textbooks also share attributes that are negative, some of which are inevitable results of their positive qualities. Texts are criticized, for example, for being too long (the risk of being thorough), or too theoretical (the risk of emphasizing broad, universal ideas), or lacking in coherent perspective (too much balancing of perspectives), or not sensitive enough to the diversity of students (another by-product of focusing on universality rather than differences).

Whether framed as strengths or problems, the qualities of commercial textbooks may not represent oversights by authors as much as the commercial imperatives of the textbook industry. For economic reasons, textbook publishers require large markets and centralized production. They therefore favor producing books that have wide appeal—a mandate that easily leads to long books, expensive production features, and noncommittal perspectives. At a more subtle level, commercial textbooks position readers as recipients of relatively indisputable ideas, rather than as self-constructors of knowledge (Apple, 1987). Implicitly positioning readers this way happens even when authors try to be appropriately “modest” in their knowledge claims. To a significant extent the tendency is inevitable given the static, linear nature of textbooks: the unstated assumption of every author is—and must be—that readers will allow the author to guide their thoughts. In some fields, including educational psychology, authors may also hope for readers to question or critique the text, but questioning and critiquing are not under authors’ control as fully as presenting ideas, theories, concepts, and examples. An author may include discussion questions or interactive supplements, but students cannot be counted on to respond to these, and instructors cannot be counted to encourage them to do so. Even if students do respond and thereby “think actively,” their responses are usually framed by the author as primarily personal beliefs needing modification or development, not as knowledge to be respected.

It should not be surprising, therefore, that education students tend to value text-based courses such as educational psychology less than other parts of teacher education, such as curriculum studies and practice teaching (Floden & Meniketti, 2005; Zeichner, 2005). In these latter areas, students’ prior knowledge can add to their learning more directly, and more easily recognized by others as legitimate.

An obvious, though possibly naïve remedy for the limitations of commercial textbooks might be to dispense with such books altogether, and simply to ask students to write their own reference book. In principle, student-authoring should not only empower students’ learning, but also lead to a text that students regard as highly relevant to their needs. And it should insure that students invest in the nature and development of the text. On the face of it, therefore, student-authoring should be a motivating way to learn about educational psychology. Instead of thinking of themselves as consumers of others’ knowledge, students could—at least ideally—think of themselves as creators of knowledge that they truly value.

But there are obvious cautions about student-authoring. First, would a student-written text provide adequate coverage of the field of educational psychology? If a class divided up the work of writing, for example, each individual might over-focus on the special section for which he or she was responsible, and not attend enough to the topics written by others. Instructional strategies would be needed to counteract any tendency to overspecialization. Second, would students know enough to make wise choices about content? Perhaps some would choose a topic only because it was convenient, easy to research, or already familiar, and not because they judged a topic important for professional development. It might simply be unreasonable to expect students to know what to include in a textbook since students, by definition, do not “know” the field already. Third, even if the other problems could be solved, would students have writing skills sufficient to create a readable textbook—even one meant for each others’ use? Since anecdotal evidence as well as research on writing suggests that many students struggle with expository composition (Creme, 2008), there is good reason to expect difficulties for some student-authors.

As important as these concerns are, there are ways to deal with all of them, and therefore reason to consider student-written textbooks as a strategy for dealing with the limitations of commercial textbooks. Simple teaching strategies exist, for example, to insure that students read broadly about educational psychology. Students can be assigned to read or edit each other’s contributions to the text, for example, or simply assigned a variety of supplementary readings for the course. (It should also be noted, in fairness, that commercially published textbooks are also not usually assigned or read in their entirety, either by instructors or by students.) Difficulties with writing, furthermore, are not exclusive to student-written textbooks: they are widespread in university classes, whatever the genre that reading or writing assignments take. The fact that a student-written text might be less than polished does not mean that such a text cannot or should not be attempted; authentic writing is a positive learning strategy even when the writing needs editing. And less-than-polished writing is can be useful or informative to fellow students, even if imperfect.

Methods

With these possibilities and cautions in mind, the author undertook a two-year study of how his own university students designed and wrote their own textbooks about educational psychology. No commercially published textbook was assigned for purchase, nor even assigned for reading. Instead students were supported in creating and publishing their own text. This task constituted about one half of students’ assigned work for the course (a description of the other half of their work can be found at the author’s website: <http://home.umanitoba.ca/~seifert>). The actual writing and publishing used a wiki platform, software that allows multiple users to write and edit each other’s web pages. (A well-known example of a wiki is the online encyclopedia Wikipedia (<http://en.wikipedia.org>), but many others exist.) This paper reports and assesses the results of their work during each of the two years of the study.

The Course, the Students, and the Instructor

The students were registered for one of three possible sections of a course called “Psychology of Learning,” required of all preservice teachers at a comprehensive, public university. Like most introductory courses in educational psychology, this one provided a broad survey of the field, touching on topics about learning, development, motivation, and assessment of learning. In addition it covered topics related to instructional planning, including the teaching of children with special needs. The course comprised 18 two-hour sessions; for two sections these were concentrated in one semester, but for a third section the same number of sessions was spread over two semesters.

Because of admission requirements at their particular university, the students all possessed a previous Bachelor’s degree in a field normally taught in public schools (history, English, science). In this sense they were more “educated” than many undergraduate students and resembled many Master’s-level students in age and life experience. Some had previous experience working with children (for example, as an instructional assistant in public school) or with adults (e.g. in a previous career in business), though none had actual classroom teaching experience. As it happened, timetabling circumstances meant that all of the student-authors were expecting to teach in the primary grades of school (kindergarten through fourth-grade)—a circumstance that may have affected their content priorities, as discussed later.

As already mentioned, the instructor was also the author of this paper (myself, Kelvin Seifert). As instructor, Seifert had considerable experience with introductory educational psychology. He had taught the course more than 75 times over 35 years to a wide variety of students (not just those focused on the primary grades). He had also authored commercially published textbooks about educational psychology (Seifert, 1991, 1999) and child development (Seifert & Hoffnung, 2000; Seifert, Hoffnung, & Hoffnung, 2001). He therefore had an unusual degree of familiarity with the topics and subtopics contained in major commercial textbooks about educational psychology, including awareness both of the characteristics of the major individual texts.

Seifert therefore had a dual role, serving as both teacher educator and principal investigator of an action research project. The duality created a risk of conflict of interest: Seifert-as-teacher was in a position to evaluate the quality of students’ work, but the Seifert-as-investigator was in a position to publicize the work, whatever its quality. Violating the privacy of evaluations of students’ work was avoided by confining analysis of the students’ textbooks only in their publicly posted Table of Contents (TC) and to group statistics about their preferred topics (see the sections below on procedures about how these were gathered). No analysis of the actual quality of students’ articles was included in this particular research study, even though in the long run such analysis will obviously be important for assessing the value of student-written textbooks. (The resulting wiki and textbook, without evaluation, is available online at <http://LTC.umanitoba.ca/wiki/Educational_Psychology> .)

Procedures in Year 1

In Year 1, two sections of the Psychology of Learning course participated, with enrollments of 32 and 33 students, respectively. The instructor provided students in each of the sections with a list of 155 suggested topics about educational psychology developed from the instructors’ lengthy teaching and textbook-writing experience. The topics represented a composite of topics found in a variety of commercial textbooks about introductory educational psychology. In a general way therefore the list resembled a Table of Contents for a “generic” textbook in this field, though it was explicitly designed not to parallel any particular existing textbook.

After a brief explanation of the topics from the instructor, students signed up to write a section of 1200-1500 words about one of the topics. Most chose a topic from the instructor’s list, although a few proposed different topics of their own. Some degree of leeway was possible in choosing and crafting topics. Up to three students were allowed to write about any one topic, and individuals were free to tailor or design their presentation of a topic as they saw fit. The titles of the sections that were finally written therefore differed frequently from the titles and terms offered on the instructor’s initial topic list. Often, too, two articles on nominally the “same” topic differed somewhat from each other in title and emphasis. In general there were many more possible topics than students to write about them, so many topics on the initially presented list remained unclaimed. Most of these, though not all, were removed from the final posted TC.

After writing and posting their textbook sections online, students chose, read and edited a section written by one other student. They used the wiki editing functions to facilitate this task. Editing was required to be “significant,” meaning that students had either to add about 30% more material to the original article, or to change an equivalent amount of material. They also were required to add resources (usually relevant external websites) and links that cross-referenced their edited section to other relevant parts of the textbook. These steps were intended to reduce the tendency toward overspecialization of attention inherent in dividing a large writing task among many individual authors.

Procedures in Year 2

The procedures for Year 1 gave students significant freedom to choose and craft particular topics, and it insured broad coverage in the final textbook as a whole. But it limited students’ freedom to some extent. The original list of 155 possible topics had been devised by the instructor, after all, not the students. The procedures also focused students’ attention on their personal contributions at the expense of attending to the book as a whole. Overspecialization of attention was dealt with partially by students’ editing each others’ contributions and by their adding cross-links within the text. These steps were constructive, but hardly amounted to a full remedy for the problem of overspecialization. Although no assessment of students’ reading of the overall textbook was made, it seems likely that most students focused primarily on his or her own topic, secondarily on the topic they they edited, and very little on the rest of the text (Rafael & Neto, 2007; Stevens & Slavin, 1995; Bonk, et. al., 2008).

In Year 2, therefore, two procedural changes were made to insure that coverage was not only provided in the textbook, but also experienced by students in reading for the course. The first change was to devote more time to designing the contents of the book. Working in small groups, students were assigned to “design a complete Table of Contents for an ideal textbook about educational psychology.” To support this task, the instructor provided photocopies of the TCs of four major textbooks (those by Woolfolk, Ormrod, Snowman, and Slavin), and put sample copies of these and other textbooks on reserve in the university library. Students were also referred to the TC of the earlier edition of the online textbook developed in Year 1. Significant class time (parts of class sessions spanning six weeks) was allocated to developing a TC for their own textbook. Each student also chose two or three sections of their proposed TC which he or she preferred to write.

The instructor (Kelvin Seifert) examined the several TCs resulting from the groups’ work to identify overlaps and conflicts in content, and to assign students particular topics to write about. As it turned out, there were no significant conflicts among groups in content proposed, though the TCs did overlap somewhat in several places (e.g. more than one group proposed topics related to special education). The instructor was therefore able to create a “master” Table of Contents from students’ collective proposals. Since students had indicated more than one topic preference, the instructor was also able to assign students to topics with little difficulty. The resulting composite TC was posted on the students’ wiki shortly after the groups submitted their proposals. He also grouped articles that were loosely related into chapters; it is important to note, though, that the chapter titles were created by the instructor, not the students.

The second procedural change in Year 2 had to do with students’ reading tasks. Late in the course, after writing and posting their textbook contributions, students were assigned to read the entire textbook—the articles written by all classmates—and to select three which they considered especially useful for their purposes as future teachers. They then wrote a brief essay explaining the reasons for their choices. The meaning of “especially useful” was left deliberately open for individuals to explain. This task therefore insured a broader reading about educational psychology than had happened in Year 1. At the same time it provided additional information about students’ content priorities—about why they regarded some topics as important or valuable.

Data Analysis of TCs

Summary descriptions of the TCs were developed for both student textbooks and for two commercial textbooks (Woolfolk, Winne, & Perry (2008); Ormrod (2008)). The summaries followed basic procedures of content analysis (Neuendorf, 2002; Bogdan & Biklen, 2006), and consisted of these steps:

1)     Every TC was transcribed into a simple Word document format;

2)     Each meaningful term in the TC was listed and counted using the “find and replace” scanning function of Word (though a few terms were excluded from the listing, as explained below);

3)     Terms were grouped into one of 13 general categories according to their meaning within educational psychology (see Table 4 for explanations of the categories);

4)     Terms with ambiguous meanings were classified more than once according to the main purpose implied by the context of each occurrence (e.g. occurrences of the term attention were classified three ways depending on its context of usage: 1) as related to special education as in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, 2) as related to cognition as in information processing, or 3) as related to classroom management as in ensuring orderly learning in class.)

5)     The frequency of each category was tallied for each TC, and the relative frequency of the category indicated by converting the frequencies to percentages of occurrences of all categories;

6)     A profile of the content emphasis of each TC was constructed by compiling the relative frequencies of the categories for each TC;

7)     The content emphases of TCs were compared by examining the profiles of TCs for the students’ texts and the two commercial texts (Woolfolk, et al. and Ormrod).

Note that prepositions and conjunctions (e.g. the words what, the, an, of, but) were omitted from analysis, as were a few words that lacked unique meaning within educational psychology (e.g. in the TC heading, So you want to become a teacher, the words want and become were omitted, but not the word teacher). To insure comparability between students’ and commercial texts, in addition, terms from chapter titles were also omitted. These had been devised by the instructor for the students’ texts, but (obviously) not for the commercial texts.

Data Analysis of Students’ Recommended Articles

The articles recommended by students in Year 2 were classified according to the same set of categories used for analyzing the TCs. Each article received a score equal to the frequency with which it was recommended by students, and each category then received a score that was the sum of the scores of the articles within that category. No attempt was made to differentiate among first, second, and third choices of articles; each type of choice was weighted equally. The weighted frequencies of the categories, expressed as percentages, provided an alternative profile of students’ content priorities—one distinct from the choices expressed by the students’ TCs themselves and that therefore “triangulated” those choices. (Note, however, that this alternative profile was possible only for the second edition of the students’ textbook, because only Year 2 students provided recommendations about individual topics.)

Results

Tables 1 and 2 summarize the TCs of the first and second student-written editions, respectively. The first edition, created by two sections of “Psychology of Learning,” was organized into six chapters, with 65 sections for the book as a whole. The second edition, created by only one section of the course, was organized into seven chapters and 28 sections. Obviously both editions were much shorter than commercial textbooks: the first was about 25% as long, and the second about 15% as long. Their brevity reflected the numbers of student-authors available, as well as constraints placed by the instructor on the length and number of contributions per student. It is noteworthy that both editions covered a broad range of topics, and that most of these resembled topics commonly found in commercial textbooks.

            Table 3 lists the terms found in one or more of the four editions studied (i.e. in the students’ 1st edition, the students’ 2nd edition, the Woolfolk 10th edition, or the Ormrod 5th edition). The terms are grouped by the categories into which they were classified. 285 terms appeared at least once in at least one of these three editions, out of 1024 occurrences of terms altogether. Table 4 defines the categories themselves. The number of terms per category ranged from five to 40. Not surprisingly, the number of terms per category correlated closely with the number of occurrences of terms per category.

Tables 5 and 6 show the frequencies of categories for the four textbooks. As the table shows, the frequency of categories varies from one textbook to another, in some cases by a ratio of 2:1 or more. In both editions of the students’ textbooks, in particular, the categories of special education and theories occurred two to three times more often than in the TC of either Woolfolk or Ormrod. The categories of assessment and classroom management, on the other hand, occurred only half as often as in the TC of either Woolfolk or Ormrod.

Table 7 lists the 28 articles written for the students’ second edition, grouped according to the same classification scheme used for categorizing the TCs. As with the TCs, article titles were assigned to categories based on the major intent of the actual article, even when terms in a title might sometimes refer to another category when used in some other discussion or publishing context. The table also shows the frequencies with which each category of article was recommended by fellow students. (To preserve the privacy of students, the vote count or “popularity” of individual articles is not listed.) As the figures in Table 7 show, classroom management accounted for over a third of the recommendations; this category, together with motivation, accounted for almost half of them; and four categories (classroom management, motivation, social, and instructional planning) accounted for 80% of all recommendations. At the other end of the popularity scale, theories and assessment accounted for only 2.5% and 3.8% of all recommendations, respectively.

Note that students’ recommendations are mostly not consistent with the priorities implied by the frequency of topics chosen for the students’ TCs. This point is illustrated in Table 6, which lists the frequency of students’ recommendations alongside the frequency of their TC topics. It is also summarized in Table 8, which shows the Pearson r correlations among all four TCs with each other as well as with the students’ recommendations. As the table shows, all TCs—including the students’—correlated significantly (p < .01) with each other, varying between 0.64 (Ormrod with students’ first edition) and 0.84 (Ormrod with Woolfolk). Yet no TC correlated significantly with the students’ recommendations (-0.13 to 0.33). Possible reasons for this pattern are discussed in the next section, along with implications both for teaching educational psychology and for publishing textbooks about educational psychology.

Educational Significance

When asked to design an ideal textbook about educational psychology, students created a document that resembled major existing published textbooks much more than when asked to recommend parts of their textbook that they consider especially valuable or important. Results of the design task correlated with existing textbooks significantly, but results of the recommendation task did not. If the two tasks are regarded as forms of a triangulation in learning students’ “true” priorities about educational psychology, then they seem largely to cancel each other out. Priorities expressed in TC design are not necessarily the priorities expressed in recommendations.

Triangulating Students’ Recommendations

How to interpret this seeming contradiction? Clues can be found by considering the context of each of the students’ tasks—the constraints and opportunities that each task provided. In the first task, student acted as authors, but specifically as authors with little experience or knowledge of educational psychology. They therefore relied on any prior knowledge of textbook design and any documents at hand that seemed relevant. Prominent among the latter were existing published textbooks in the field, including the specific texts and Tables of Contents that the instructor recommended as potentially helpful in designing their own Tables of Contents. Since these materials were the primary “mental furniture” with which students worked, it is not surprising that students’ own design for a text resembled previously published, successful books. Borrowing organizational ideas from these sources was understandable even though the instructor repeatedly encouraged students to identify and emphasize topics which they valued personally, regardless of their presence, absence, or emphasis in commercial textbooks. Despite this encouragement, students very sensibly realized that departing substantially from conventional textbook coverage might make them seem ignorant of what a “real” textbook about educational psychology is supposed to look like.

The second task—recommending valuable articles and justifying their choices—did not pose this same constraint. In doing this task, students worked with two well-defined resources: a textbook already designed and written (their own), and their personal concerns and values about teaching. Because they had to justify their choice of preferred articles, making merely shallow or thoughtless choices was less likely (though not impossible). Departing from the emphases found in conventional published textbooks therefore held less risk than on the first task of making a student seem foolish or ignorant. On the face of it, therefore, the students’ recommendations seem likely to be more valid than students’ TCs as indicators of their priorities about educational psychology.

There is no way to test this interpretation definitively, however, since in this study students were not actually interviewed about their motives when doing the assignment. Future research would benefit from adding such interviews, or at least open-ended written surveys, in order to establish students’ motives more clearly. Presumably students would respond to interviews or surveys in direct, honest ways—though note that questions might still remain about whether students shape or edit their interview responses to what they expect an interviewer wanted to hear. If the investigator did not also serve as the students’ instructor, however, self-editing of interview responses might be reduced significantly. In this study, such detachment was not possible because the investigator was also the students’ instructor and therefore needed to avoid potential conflicts of interest in these roles.

It should be noted, finally, that students gave low priority to one topic—assessment of learning—not only when making recommendations, but also in designing the TCs. It is possible that the consistency happened simply by chance; with thirteen categories of terms, after all, mere random variation might create the impression of consistency in at least one of them. But it is also possible that the apparent rejection of assessment as an important topic is not random, but meaningful to the students.

What might be the meaning of relegating assessment to a minor part of the students’ textbook? As noted earlier, these particular students were all enrolled in courses focused exclusively on teaching the early grades (K-4), and generally they intended to teach only in these early grades once they graduated. Many students also had prior experience working exclusively with this age group. It seems likely that these circumstances and intentions affected their content priorities about educational psychology. With regard to assessment, these background factors may have contributed to create negative biases. The early years program included no course per se about assessment of learning; instead curriculum instructors presented their own ideas about assessment in the context of the various curriculum courses taken by the students. These generally supported a relatively non-traditional, process-oriented views of assessment—ones that emphasized portfolios, for example, and other informal and process-oriented forms of evaluation. The approach was generally critical of traditional paper-and-pencil testing, and most especially of standardized, government-sponsored assessments of learning recently instituted for early years children. Given these circumstances, it is plausible for students to have avoided what they perceived, rightly or wrongly, to be a negative topic, classroom assessment. Again, however, interviews of students would help establish whether this reasoning is not only plausible, but likely.

Implications for Teaching Educational Psychology

Even though students’ priorities can be clarified further by additional studies, the current study itself has implications for both the teaching of educational psychology and the publication of textbooks about educational psychology. With regard to teaching educational psychology, the study suggests that creating student-written textbook can be an effective tool in preservice teacher education, assigned either as a supplement to a traditional commercial textbook or even as its replacement. For it to be effective, however, requires giving students both ample time to formulate their goals for the book, as well as incentives for reading and reflecting on the entire book rather than on just their own contributions. In this study, for example, students had about six weeks to prepare the initial table of contents, and wrote brief assessments of several classmates’ articles. These arrangements seemed adequate, though no doubt other arrangements are also worth exploring. In addition to simply allocating time as such, students also would benefit from periodic discussions about the nature and purposes of the cultural artifact called “a textbook,” about how textbooks compare to research studies, and about how students’ own values, goals, and history can and should influence their authorship. These factors cannot be left unexamined because they combine to guide students’ decisions in designing their own textbook.

Discussions about these background issues would free students more fully from stereotyped notions of what a “textbook” is supposed to be, and in turn make writing their own text both more motivating and more truly diagnostic of students’ priorities about educational psychology. Since students’ pasts and futures vary, the chances are that their content priorities will vary as well, and that the variations will be expressed in their self-designed TCs. Urban students aiming to teach high school, for example, might express different priorities for learning educational psychology than would rural students aiming to teach the primary grades. Such differences would be relatively easy to accommodate if students designed their own textbook about the field. They would be harder to accommodate if students all learned from a single, “universal” volume, such as is normally provided by commercial publishers. In that case differentiating instruction will be more challenging.

With a universal text, fewer chapters or sections may be assigned by the instructor (or read by students even if assigned), simply because more parts of the book may be considered not relevant. An instructor may feel compelled to assign additional readings to compensate for mismatches between students’ priorities and those of the textbook. And the instructor may have to do more persuading to convince students that ideas alleged by the text to be universal really do apply to the personal lives and work circumstances of students. In one way or another, all of these challenges can be traced to the oft-noted gap between theory and practice in education—between academic knowledge of educational psychology, in this case, and personally constructed professional knowledge and commitments.

Implications for Publishing Textbooks about Educational Psychology

Publishers of textbooks about educational psychology or related fields can therefore provide more effective books if they respond to students’ priorities directly, and not simply as they are filtered through the recommendations of instructors. As this study suggests, students have identifiable priorities about content, and these do not necessarily match the priorities found in existing major textbooks. If students emphasize classroom management consistently, as in this study, then publishers may want to expand coverage of this topic well beyond what is found in current educational psychology texts. If they avoid priorizing the assessment of learning consistently, then publishers may want to locate and encourage authors who can explicitly honor students’ reasons for the avoidance, while also honoring instructors’ desire (if any) to include this topic as part of introductory educational psychology.

More challenging for publishers will be topics that are favored by some groups of students but not by others. What if one group of students (future kindergarten teachers, let us suppose) favors play or inquiry as a learning medium, but another group (future high school physics teachers, let us suppose) favors direct teaching and assessment of learning? In cases like these, it is especially important for publishers to experiment with business models that de-emphasize a one-content-fits-all product, and that support individualization of content as strongly as possible.

The recent trend to “modularization” (very short chapters), for example, is a step toward individualization, but steps that are even more innovative remain to be taken. The strengths of the Internet, in particular, have not yet been exploited fully. Internet resource centers for teaching educational psychology, for example, can be created akin to existing resource centers for teaching introductory psychology (see http://intropsychresources.com) and other specializations within psychology (see http://personalitypedagogy.arcadia.edu or http://jonathan.mueller.faculty.noctrl.edu/crow). Such centers can potentially offer even more resources from a wider range of contributors than existing proprietary websites keyed to just one textbook, and thus offer individualized materials to a greater degree than in the past. Wikis and blogs provide easy-to-use tools for collecting and publicizing such materials. In particular, as shown in this study, wikis work well for critiquing textbooks and for adding material to them, and I these ways tailoring the emphasis of such texts to local needs. The textbooks thus critiqued and enhanced can be student-written, as in this study, or they can be written by expert authors and published commercially.

Such changes will necessitate new business models for the textbook publishing industry. Instead of a single main text as the most valuable part of a textbook “package,” for example, perhaps the individualized “extras” need to become the most valuable—and therefore the most marketable—features. The text itself would then become relatively small and inexpensive, and serve to point the way to ancillary features that would be more tailor-made and therefore more valued. Examples of equivalent changes have already occurred in other major products that use the Internet. Adobe Acrobat essentially gives its widely used reader software away freely, for example, making money instead by selling the “ancillaries” that facilitate desk-top publishing and the writing of PDF files. Likewise Google simply gives away its browser, making money from selling advertisements and other individualized enhancements to its services. In both cases the central product is simple, broadly useful, and free; it simultaneously serves the public and leads to services that not only more tailor-made, but more profitable.

In any case, instructors of educational psychology are not responsible for the success of the publishing industry, but for the success of students. Given this role, it seems important therefore to take into account students’ priorities about the content of this field, however they are expressed or implied. The present study demonstrated two ways to do so—using a wiki-based to design a student-written textbook, and asking students to reflect on their own priorities among topics about educational psychology. It also suggested that classroom management in particular may hold special importance for preservice students, and that greater coverage of this topic in introductory educational psychology may therefore be welcomed. For reasons already indicated, however, this last conclusion needs further investigation. More thorough triangulation of students’ priorities, through interviews or surveys, should provide instructors with even better advice about what they ought to be teaching.


Table 1:

Table of Contents of Students ’Educational Psychology, 1st Edition

Chapter 1: The Learning Process

            Behaviorism: Changes in what students do

                        Classical (respondent) conditioning

                        Respondent conditioning in the classroom

                        Key terms of respondent conditioning

            Operant conditioning

                        Comparing operant and respondent conditioning

            Information processing and cognitive theory

                        Working memory (Short-term memory)

                        Activating prior knowledge

                        Creativity in classroom learning

Chapter 2: Student Development

            Physical and motor skill development during the school years

                        Development of motor skills

Puberty and its effects on students

            Cognitive development: The theory of Jean Piaget

                        The sensorimotor stage

            Social development

                        Erik Erikson: Psychosocial crises of development—Part 1

                        Erik Erikson: Psychosocial crises of development—Part 2

                        The impact of family stresses on Erik Erikson’s model

                        Abraham Maslow: A hierarchy of motives and needs—Part 1

                        Abraham Maslow: A hierarchy of motives and needs—Part 2

            Moral development: Forming a sense of rights and responsibilities

                        Bullying

                        Identifying types of bullying and the role of teachers

Chapter 3: Student diversity

            Emotional intelligence

            Gender differences in the classroom

                        Is there a physical basis for gender roles?

                        Social differences in gender roles—Part 1

                        Social differences in gender roles—Part 2

                        How teachers influence gender roles

            Differences in cultural expectations and styles

                        Bilingualism: Language differences in the classroom

                        Teaching bilingual students—Part 1

                        Teaching bilingual students—Part 2

                        Cultural differences in language use

            Effects of poverty on children and learning

            Physical health and learning

                        Children’s health and nutrition

                        The effects of poor nutrition and health on learning

            Family life

                        Parent support and involvement

                        Family stresses

                        Impacts of divorce

            Assessing learning with diverse learners

                        Are standardized tests biased?

                        Assessing the role of standardized tests

                        Standardized tests: biased or not?

Chapter 4: Students with special educational needs

            Responsibilities of teachers for students with disabilities

                        Individual educational plan (IEP)

            Learning disabilities

                        Defining learning disabilities clearly

            Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder

                        Differences in perceptions: ADHD and high activity

                        Causes of ADHD

                        Teaching students with ADHD—Part 1

                        Teaching students with ADHD—Part 2

                        Autism and Asperger’s syndrome

                        Fetal alcohol spectrum disorder

            Intellectual disabilities

                        Teaching students with intellectual disabilities

            Behavioral disorders

                        Behavioral and emotional disorders—Part 1

                        Strategies for teaching students with behavioral disorders—Part 1

                        Strategies for teaching students with behavioral disorders—Part 2

            Students with gifts and talents

                        Strategies for identifying and teaching gifted students—Part 1

                        Strategies for identifying and teaching gifted students—Part 2

Chapter 5: Motivation

            Motivation as goals

            Situational interest vs. personal interest

            Learned helplessness and self-efficacy

            Self-determination and intrinsic motivation—Part 1

            Self-determination and intrinsic motivation—Part 2

Chapter 6: Classroom Management

            Establishing daily procedures and routines

            Establishing classroom rules—Part 1

            Establishing classroom rules—Part 2

            Eye contact

            Communicating with parents and caregivers—Part 1

            Communicating with parents and caregivers—Part 2

            Ignoring misbehavior

            Conflict resolution and problem solving—Part 1

            Conflict resolution and problem solving—Part 2


Table 2:

Table of Contents for Students’ Educational Psychology, 2nd Edition

Chapter 1: Theories of Development

            Behaviorism

            Piaget & Vygotsky

Chapter 2: Supporting and Managing the Classroom Environment

Classroom community

Play

            Emergent curriculum

Reinforcement, positive and negative

            Discipline

Chapter 3: Motivation

            Extrinsic/intrinsic motivation

            Creativity

            Self-efficacy

            Classroom management and motivation

Chapter 4: Social Relationships

Diversity: Ethnic and cultural

Relax: Getting to know, think about, & enjoy your students

Peer relationships

            Respect: Among students, teachers, and the community

Bullying

Role of school counselors

Chapter 5: Instruction

            Modeling & the role model

            Mastery learning

            Technology: Advantages/Disadvantages

Chapter 6: Inclusive special education

The inclusive classroom: Disability and accessibility

Understanding different types of physical and intellectual disabilities

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)

            Learning Disabilities

            Flexibility in teaching children with special needs

Chapter 7: Assessment

            Pros & cons of holding students back

            Types of assessments

            Assessing students with special needs

 


Table 3:

Numbers and Frequencies of TC Terms by Category, All Editions

(Students’ 1st and 2nd Editions and Woolfolk 10thEdition)

 

 


Word/term

Freq of term

Category: Assessment

 

ability, abilities

5

achievement

4

assess, assessment

14

Authentic

1

Bias

4

criterion-referenced

1

Essay

1

evaluate, evaluating, evaluation

5

Exhibitions

1

Failure

1

grade, grades

12

improve (performance)

1

IQ

2

Interpreting

2

measured, measurement

2

norm-referenced

1

Percentage

1

performance

2

Portfolios

3

Reliability

2

score, scores, scoring

4

standardized

4

test, tests, testing

14

validity

2

Category: “Basic” Terms

 

child, children

8

development

30

education

6

educational psychology

1

history

1

Individual

7

learn, learning, learner

70

role

13

school

1

student, students

40

teach, teaching

36

teacher, teachers

19

 

 

 

 

Category: Cognitive

 

accelerated

1

apprenticeships

2

attention (thinking)

1

Cognitive

20

competence (academic)

1

Concept

6

concrete operational

1

Conditional

1

constructivism

2

constructivist

6

conventional

1

Creativity

8

critical thinking

1

Declarative

1

Expert

5

formal operations

1

Intelligence, intelligences

5

Knowledge

8

Literacy

1

mean, meaning

2

memory, memorizing

8

short-term memory

1

Working memory

1

Mental

1

metacognition, metacognitive

2

Mind

1

neo-Piagetian

1

organize, organizers, organization

4

preferences

1

Preschool

3

problem finding

1

problem solving

8

Procedural

1

Reading

3

Scaffolding

1

Situated

1

Study

1

style, styles

1

tactics (learning styles)

1

thinking, think

6

Understand, understanding

3

 

Category: Classroom

Management

 

Aggression

1

antecedents

1

Assertive

1

behaviour, behavioural

15

bullying, bully

3

classroom, classrooms

15

classroom management

1

communicate, communication

4

Community (classroom)

3

conflict resolution

2

confrontation

1

consequences

2

dialogue

1

discipline

3

discovery

1

environment

2

ethical

1

expectations

4

eye contact

1

functional

1

ignoring (misbehavior)

1

management

10

message

2

modification

2

penalties

1

praise

1

procedures (daily)

2

questioning

1

recitation

1

responsibility, responsibilities

2

routine, routines

1

rules

3

schedules

1

seatwork

1

self-instruction

1

self-management

2

self-regulation

5

time

2

token (economy)

1

violence

1

zero tolerance

1

 

 

 

 

 

 

Category: Diversity (sociological and demographic)

 

bilingual, bilingualism

5

cultural, culturally, sociocultural

15

difference

21

discrimination

1

diversity

6

economic

1

ethnic

3

language

11

multicultural

2

poverty

2

racial

2

relevant

2

resilience

1

responsive

1

respect

1

right, rights

1

sexism

1

SES

1

society

1

stereotype

1

 

Category: Family

 

caregiver, caregivers

2

community (family)

1

divorce

3

family, families (structure)

9

family (stress)

2

Parent, parenting

3

partnerships

2

 

Category: Instructional Planning

 

calculators

1

curriculum (emergent)

1

elementary

2

exposition

1

feedback

2

first weeks

1

homework

1

inquiry

1

instruction

3

mastery learning

1

mathematics

2

objective, objectives

7

prepare, preparation

1

science

1

strategy, strategies

9

student-centred

1

taxonomies

1

teacher-directed

1

technology

1

visual

1

 

Category: Motivation

 

Activating

1

anxiety

2

arousal

1

attribution

1

behaviour

1

beliefs

6

create, creating

4

efficacy

4

engaged

1

enthusiasm

1

excitement

1

extrinsic

2

fostering

1

goal

8

intention

1

interest, interests

6

intiative

2

intrinsic (motivation)

4

learned helplessness

1

motivation

5

motive, motives

2

need, needs

5

play

1

self-determination

4

self-efficacy

6

self-esteem

5

self-worth

2

task

1

 

Category: Miscellaneous

 

Context

2

principle, principles

2

 

Category: Physical

 

adolescent, adolescence (physical)

2

Brain

1

Health

4

motor skill

2

Nutrition

2

Physical

5

Puberty

1

 

 

Category: Social

 

adolescence (social)

1

Boys

2

competence (social)

2

cooperative, cooperation

2

Counselors, counselling

2

emotion, emotions

3

gender (differences, roles)

3

Girls

2

group, groups, grouping

8

Identity

4

Industry

1

Inferiority

1

Internet

1

Moral

5

peer, peers

2

Personal

1

reciprocal determinism

1

relationships

1

Safety

1

self-concept

2

self-schemas

2

sex, sexual

2

Social

9

social class

4

Spirit

1

Trust

1

 

Category: Special Education

 

accessibility (disabilities)

1

Asperger’s syndrome

1

ADHD

5

Autism

2

Behavioral disorders

4

Blindness

1

chronic health

1

Deaf

1

Diagnosis

1

disability, disabilities

17

Disorder

4

emotional (disorders)

5

exceptional

4

FASD

1

gift, gifts, gifted

3

handicap, handicaps

1

hearing

1

hyperactivity

1

incidence

2

inclusion

2

inclusive

2

IEP

1

integrate, integrated, integration

1

Intellectual (disabilities)

3

label

1

laws

1

people

1

policies

1

special needs

1

strategies (re disabilities)

4

talented

1

vision

1

 

Category: Theories and Theorists

 

Ausubel

1

Autonomy

1

behaviorism

2

Bronfenbrenner

1

Bruner

1

Classical

3

cognitive (theory)

2

common sense

1

conditioning

8

Contiguity

1

contingency

1

Definition

2

Erikson

3

Humanistic

1

Information processing

4

Maslow

2

model, modeling

2

observational

5

Operant

3

Piaget

7

reinforcement

1

Research

4

respondent (conditioning)

4

sensorimotor

1

stage, stages

2

theory, theories

11

Vygotsky

6

 

Category: Teaching and  Professionalism

 

Beginning

1

Clarity

1

improve (teaching)

1

Quality

1

Warmth

1

 

 

Total occurrences of terms:

1024

Total number of terms:

285


 


Table 4:

Categories of Terms Used in Tables of Contents

 

Category

Explanation

Assessment

Includes issues and practices about grading, marking, and “traditional” testing, as well as alternative evaluation methods (e.g. portfolios).

“Basic” Terms

Includes terms that refer to many aspects of teaching, learning, or educational psychology, and are used in ways that imply broad relevance.

Cognitive

Includes terms related to memory, thinking, and the development of thought processes. Does not include terms used to announce basic theoretical presentations of cognitive processes.

Classroom Management

Includes terms related to establishing and maintaining a positive, productive environment for learning, as well as terms related to dealing with difficult or inappropriate behaviors.

Diversity

Includes terms related to sociological differences that are ethnic, cultural, racial or economic. Does not include diversity related to disabilities or gender.

Family

Includes terms related to the structure and functioning of students’ parents and other family members, as well as the stresses and difficulties faced by parents and family members.

Instructional Planning

Includes terms related to the preparation and delivery of curriculum-related activities and lessons. Does not include terms related to assessment of classroom activities and lessons.

Motivation

Includes terms related to energizing and directing students’ efforts as well as their beliefs about their efforts and capacities.

Miscellaneous

Includes terms not otherwise classifiable from the context within the Table of Contents.

Physical

Includes terms related to health and development of the body, whether or not these are implied to affect learning per se.

Social

Includes terms related to personal interactions among students and between students and teachers. Also includes terms related to gender roles.

Special Education

Includes terms related to children with disabilities of any kind, as well as terms related to teachers’ responsibilities for these students.

Theories and Theorists

Includes terms related to general presentation of broad theories or to the theorists associated with the broad theories.

Teaching and Professionalism

Includes terms related to the nature of teaching as a profession or to the challenges and responsibilities of teachers as professionals.

 


Table 5:

Frequency of TC Terms by Category:

Students’ 1st, Students’ 2nd, Woolfolk 10th and Ormrod 5th Editions Combined

 

Word/term

Freq  of Occurrence

Number of terms

Assessment

89

23

Cognitive

124

40

Classroom Management

105

40

Diversity (sociological  & demographic)

79

19

Family

22

7

Instructional Planning

39

19

Motivation

80

28

Miscellaneous

2

2

Physical

17

6

Social

69

26

Special Education

79

33

Theories and Theorists

80

26

Teaching and  Professionalism

5

5

 

 

 

Total occurrences:

1024

 

Total number of terms:

285

 


 

Table 6:

Frequency of Categories of Terms: Students’ 1st  vs 2nd vs Woolfolk 10th  vs Ormrod 5th

 

Category

% 1/e

% 2/e

%Woolfolk

% Ormrod

Students’ Recommdtns

Assessment

3.7

4.5

10.2

10.2

3.8

Basic

24.1

14.9

23.1

12.5

0

Classroom Management

4.8

4.5

10.9

9.8

35.4

Cognitive

10.7

16.4

14.5

14.0

8.9

Diversity

10.7

7.5

7.3

10.0

3.8

Family

7

0

1.4

1.2

0

Instructional Planning

0

6

4.6

4.0

11.4

Miscellaneous

0

0

0.5

0.5

0

Motivation

8.6

10.4

7.0

9.2

19.0

Physical

4.3

1.5

0.4

0.9

0

Social

4.3

6

7.4

8.8

15.2

Special Education

10.2

17.9

5.5

5.8

8.9

Teaching

0

0

0.6

1.7

0

Theories

11.8

10.4

6.5

11.2

2.5

 


Table 7:

Classification of Students’ Recommended Articles

 

Category and Title

Frequency Recommended

% of All Recommendations

Assessment

 

3

 

 

3.8

Pros/cons of holding students back

Types of assessments

Assessing special needs

Classroom Management

 

28

 

35.4

Classroom community

Discipline

Clssrm management & motivation

Bullying

Modeling & role models

Diversity

 

3

 

3.8

Ethnic & cultural diversity

Respect for differences

Instructional Planning

 

9

 

11.4

Emergent curriculum

Mastery learning

Technology in the classroom

Motivation

 

15

 

19.0

Play

Extrinsic/intrinsic motivation

Self-efficacy

Social

 

12

 

15.2

Relax: Getting to know your students

Peer relationships

Role of the school counselor

Special Education

 

7

 

8.9

Inclusive classrooms

Understanding types of disabilities

ADHD

Learning disabilities

Flexibility in special education

Theories

 

2

 

2.5

Behaviorism

Piaget & Vygotsky

Reinforcement

 


Table 8:

Pearson r Correlations: Four Tables of Contents and Recommendations

 

 

 

Students’ 1/e TC

Students’ 2/e TC

Recommdtns

Woolfolk TC

Ormrod TC

Students’ 1/e TC

 

0.72 *

-0.13

0.77*

0.64*

Students’ 2/e TC

 

 

0.14

0.66*

0.71*

Recommdtns

 

 

 

0.20

0.34

Woolfolk TC

 

 

 

 

0.84*

Ormrod TC

 

 

 

 

 

 

(* p < .01)
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