ABSTRACT
Educational psychology focuses largely on changes of behavior that are positive and desirable—usually within the context of school objectives. Edward L. Thorndike's experiments with animals had a profound influence upon his theories of how people learn. Because he considered the essential nature of animal learning to be associationist, he tended to believe that animals lacked a capacity for ideas. Behavior-modification strategies center upon the technique of contingency management, which may be defined, as the rearrangement of environmental rewards and punishments that strengthen or weaken specified behaviour. The principle of reinforcement provides the psychological rationale for another development in education: programmed instruction. Problem solving, reasoning, and thinking are terms used more or less synonymously to refer to a broad variety of mental skills, including inductive and deductive processes, the synthesis of isolated experiences, the ferreting out of relationships, the reorganization of cognitive structure, and the like.
