Personality, Development and Learning: A Reader

This reader is designed to accompany the Open University course E206, Personality, Development and Learning. The readings look at important psychological approaches and their interaction with education, covering enduring themes, new developments and contemporary practice. The book is divided into four sections. The first starts with a consideration of the way historical changes in attitudes to child rearing affect theories about how children develop, followed by a series of readings which explore both the universal characteristics of child development and sources of individual variation. The second section is concerned with the nature of learning, and the readings in the third section deal with important areas of personality and the self. These are linked with the problems of disruptive and maladjusted children. The final section of the book looks specifically at the impact psychology has had on educational policies and practices, exploring ways of measuring abilities, psychological explanations of success and failure, and curriculum innovations directly based on psychological theories.

Table of Contents:
Part 1 Human development: children and the family; our adult world and its roots in infancy; the stages of the intellectual development of the child; modifiability of cognitive development; the role of play in the problem-solving of children 3-5 years old; characteristics of maternal and paternal behaviour in traditional and non-traditional Swedish families. Part 2 Learning - theoretical and practical issues: an analysis of simple learning situations; the Tvind schools; a teacher's implicit model of how children learn; remembering drink orders - the memory skills of cocktail waitresses; measurement constructs and psychological structure - psychometrics; conversations with children; into print - reading and language growth. Part 3 Personality and self: am I me or am I the situation? personal dispositions, situations and interactionism in personality; sources of information about the self; the effects of teachers' behaviour on pupils' attributions - a review; maladjusted children and the child guidance service; withdrawal units and the psychology of problem behaviour. Part 4 Psychology in practice: psychology and education; intelligence tests and educational reform in England and Wales in the 1940s; the learning-disabilities test battery - empirical and social issues; biological explanations of sex-role stereotypes; the search for effective schools; cognitive development and the preschool; education can compensate.