Growth is the Word | W12 Q1 | Discussion

It would be false to claim that advances in technology will not require changes in the field of educational psychology — I will not make that claim now. But I will suggest that *growth* might be a more apt word than *change*. The word “change” tends to carry with it a perception of replacement. I think there are many foundational ideas in educational psychology that will not go away with the continued advances in technology. Connections to prior knowledge, for example, will still be important (Kirshner, Sweller, & Clark, 2006; Schmidt et al., 2007 — yes, people on both sides of the discovery learning debate agree on this!). But advances in technology will require the field of educational technology to grow. No longer can the measures used in educational psychology be focused on rote skills, and no longer can we rely on tightly-controlled experiments. We need to expand our areas of attention to include the development of messier-to-measure skills, like adaptation to new circumstances (Kuhn, 2007). These are the kinds of skills that technology developments have made most important to teach to children in schools.

Greater integration of media into formal and informal environments will also require growth in educational psychology. In particular, new studies are needed that examine learning that happens in the blended formal and informal spaces made available by social media. The dichotomy between informal and formal learning is shifting (Mishra, Koehler, & Greenhow, 2015), and educational psychology will need to grow to understand the new areas these shifting boundaries are opening up.