ABSTRACT
Psychology is a broad discipline, and its constituent areas – which might be identified as social psychology, developmental psychology, biological psychology, cognitive psychology and individual differences – are applied to the study of education and to educational policy and practice. How could they not, one might think, given psychologists’ extensive studies of processes of learning and memory and of children’s development, their acquisition of skills such as reading and writing, their understanding of number, science or moral principles? Psychology also studies children of exceptional abilities, problems of adjustment, parent-child relations, social interactions and relationships, friendships, peer influences, inter-and intra-group processes, bullying, attitudes, motivation and emotion and so on. Nevertheless, despite these endeavours the relation of psychology to education is problematic. There are debates within psychology as to how these topics should be conceptualised and studied and there are sustained criticisms of the nature of the discipline from within and outside psychology. The concerns of this volume are the relations between education and its disciplines in the context of the ‘demographic crisis’ in education research (Mills et al., 2006). I address these concerns in relation to psychology by offering a brief overview of psychology’s major contributions to education in the past, a description of the organisational framework of psychology and its relation to education, consideration of the state of research in the psychology of education and reflections on selected current applications. One theme relates to the implications of the distinction between research in the psychology of education that is undertaken in university psychology departments and research that is located in departments and schools of education. The distinction is relevant for a number of reasons. First, the demographic profiles of psychology and education are quite distinct when these are defined in terms of Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) units of assessment (Mills et al., 2006). Second, the division between departments may contribute to the fragmentation of research in the psychology of education. On the one hand, the psychology of education plays only a small part in the research activities
of psychology departments, where theoretical developments and methodological originality and refinement tend to be valued more highly than applications. On the other hand, psychological research is scattered across many education departments, few of which have a significant presence of psychologists (Crozier, 2007). The demographic crisis ought to be considered in this context.
