• Psychology is concerned with the question of how people

learn, and curriculum specialists ask how psychology can

contribute to the design and delivery of curriculum.
• Psychology provides a basis for understanding the
teaching and learning process. Both processes are
essential to curricularists because the curriculum has
worth only when students learn and gain knowledge.
• questions of interest to psychologists and curriculum specialists
are the following:
• Why do learners respond as they do to teachers’ efforts?
• How do cultural experiences affect students’ learning?
• How should curriculum be organized to enhance learning?
• What impact does the school culture have on students’ learning?
• What is the optimal level of student participation in learning the
curriculum’s various contents?
• Historically, the major theories of learning have been classified into
three groups:
• (1) behaviorist or association theories, the oldest group, which deals
with various aspects of stimulus-response (S-R) and reinforcers;
• (2) cognitive information-processing theories, which view the learner
in relation to the total environment and consider the way the learner
applies information; and
• (3) phenomenological and humanistic theories, which consider the
whole child, including their social, psychological, and cognitive
development.
• When cognitive information-processing theories are
stressed, the learning process focuses on the student’s
developmental stages and multiple forms of intelligence as
well as problem solving, critical thinking, and creativity.
The phenomenological aspects of learning deal with the
learner’s needs, attitudes, and feelings and entail more
alternatives in learning.
 Behaviorism and Curriculum
• Curriculum specialists can adopt procedures to increase the likelihood that each
student will find learning relevant and enjoyable.
• When new topics or activities are introduced, connections should be built on
students’ positive experiences. Things about which each student is likely to have
negative feelings should be identified and modified, if possible, to produce positive
results.
• Like other curricularists, behaviorists believe that the curriculum should be
organized so that students can master the subject matter. However, behaviorists
are highly prescriptive and diagnostic; they rely on step-by-step, structured
learning methods. For students who have difficulty learning, curriculum and
instruction can be broken down into small units with appropriate sequencing of
tasks and reinforcement of desired behavior.
• In general, combining behaviorism with learning includes careful analysis and
sequencing of learners’ needs and behaviors. Principles of testing, monitoring,
drilling, and feedback are characteristic. The learning conditions needed for
successful outcomes are carefully planned through small instructional steps and
sequences of responses that increasingly approximate the desired behavior or
learning. These basic principles tend to coincide with today’s basic-skills training
programs in reading and language development (such as DISTAR, SQ3R, and
Continuous Progress), as well as methods of individualized instruction, direct
instruction, mastery learning, instructional training (design), and competency-based
education. The emphasis on these programs and methods involves remediation, skill
acquisition, matching instructional materials to learners’ abilities, step-by-step
activities, repetition, practice, drill, reinforcement, and review
 Cognitive Perspective
• Cognitive psychologists are interested in generating theories that give insight into
the nature of learning, specifically how individuals generate structures of
knowledge and how they create or learn reasoning and problem-solving
strategies. How do people organize knowledge? How do they store information?
How do they retrieve data and generate conclusions? These are central questions
for cognitive psychologists, who also are interested in how individuals use new
information and understandings. Cognitive psychologists are interested not only
in the amount of knowledge people possess, but also in its type and its influence
on further cognitive actions.
• These psychologists focus on how individuals process information, how they
monitor and manage their thinking, and the results of their thinking on their
information-processing capabilities
• They believe there are two types of memory: short term and long term.
Some educators have divided short term memory into immediate
memory and working memory. Immediate memory operates consciously
or subconsciously, holding inputs for approximately 30 seconds, during
which a person decides whether perceived data are important.
• Long-term memory deals with two types of information: semantic (“the
way the world is”) and procedural (“the way we do things”). This
memory stores and retrieves information. In contrast to working
memory, long-term memory has infinite capacity. Effective learners
transfer information from working memory into long-term memory as
quickly as possible
 The Montessori Method
Maria Montessori (1870–1952), a great pedagogist of the early 20th century,
directed the Psychiatric Clinic at the University of Rome. There she encountered
children with mental and physical disabilities who had been placed in insane
asylums. She soon concluded that the root of the problem in many cases was not
medical (the prevailing opinion), but educational and psychological.
• Montessori’s contemporaries were astonished when she taught these “difficult”
children to read and write at a normal level. Her public response was that her
instructional methods were based on a rational, scientific approach that
considered children’s developmental stages. She became “convinced that similar
methods applied to normal children”; instead of being forced to memorize facts
and sit quietly in their seats, they could “develop or set free their personality in a
marvelous and surprising way.”
• Rejecting the dominant behaviorist theories based on stimulus-response,
Montessori emphasized looking and listening, which she viewed as sensory
input channels of learning and as the first phases of intellectual
development. Whereas “the behaviorists believed that it is the motor side,
rather than the sensory side, that is important in learning,” she believed
that the more things a child listens to and looks at, the better for mental
development. “Dewey [also] gave emphasis to the motor side . . . in his
belief that the child learns chiefly by doing.”Montessori emphasized a rich
variety of visual and auditory inputs (often absent in low-income families).
• Therefore, it can be argued that she was a cognitive developmentalist first
and a progressive educator second
• Montessori maintained that children develop at different rates. Some are more coordinated than
others and more mature in their thinking and social relationships. Except in extreme cases, such
differences are normal. Some children need additional encouragement and support in certain areas
of growth; others need it in other areas. (Piaget would later refer to this as positive environment.)
Montessori also recognized that certain cognitive and social abilities develop before others:
children sit before they walk, grab objects before they manipulate them, and babble before they
talk.
• Montessori also noted that poor children were unprepared for school and that they increasingly
lagged behind middle-class children as they progressed through grade levels. She concluded, “The
down-trodden of society are also down-trodden in the school.” Her goal was threefold: enrich
children’s school environment, provide children with success in performing tasks to bolster their
self-confidence, and provide structural play to teach basic skills. In short, she compensated for the
deficiencies of the children’s homes and slum conditions. Thus, the seeds of compensatory
education were planted. Sixty years would pass before compensatory education would be fully
accepted in the United States, as part of President Johnson’s War on Poverty
• Montessori’s school environment was antidotal. She
provided sensory impressions (Piaget and others would
later call these sensory stimuli) to enhance the children’s
visual and auditory discrimination. Her approach, rooted
in Pestalozzi’s pedagogy, was based on sensory
experiences with objects of the environment and a belief
that learning proceeds mostly in an atmosphere of
emotional security.