ABSTRACT
Evolutionary educational psychology is the study of the relation between folk knowledge and abilities and accompanying inferential and attributional biases as these influence academic learning in evolutionarily novel cultural contexts, especially schools. Evolutionary educational psychology is the study of how an evolved bias in children’s learning and motivational systems influences their ability and motivation to learn evolutionarily novel academic abilities and information in school. The chapter provides an overview of evolved domains of mind, corresponding learning and motivational biases, and the evolved systems that allow humans to learn about and cope with variation and change within lifetimes. Evolution plays a role not only in what we want to learn, but also in how we prefer to learn. Evolutionary psychology helps us understand why students learn certain things easily and with a lot of motivation and why other assignments cost them more effort.
