ABSTRACT
From 1967 to 1971, when I was writing Cognitive Processes in Education (Farnham-Diggory, 1972), I was largely alone in attempting to relate information-processing psychology to education. That has now changed, and the chapters in this volume represent important new contributions to the area. The chapters also reveal awareness by this group of distinguished scientists of what a big job they have undertaken. Really understanding educational problems, really analyzing the psychological processes involved, really distilling and applying psychological principles, are enormously complex tasks—only recently undertaken by theorists capable of coping with them. Prior to the last decade, the best theoretical minds in the business were working on problems derived from relatively simple learning theories of the day. Such theories were not adequate for the proper study of instructional behavior, although they were challenging in other ways. Finally, there emerged a theoretical framework—the information-processing framework—complex enough to fit the real world of education. As a result of this development, and of the caliber of scientific though it is fostering, the next 10 or 15 years of psychological research should produce major new insights into instructional issues.
