EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY 



vidual differ^ices, mental development, and the facts of 

 learning, have profoundly influenced psychological meth- 

 ods in general. Its results, likewise, have been incorporated 

 into the science and are helping to shape psychological 

 theory. The educational psychologist is merely a psy- 

 chologist who prefers to work with problems that happen 

 to have a bearing upon education; actually his personal 

 interest may have less to do with education, as such, than 

 with the eternal verities of human nature. 



If we define education as the making of changes in human 

 nature, then nothing which concerns human nature can be 

 entirely alien to it. One might go further and say that 

 nothing which concerns the behavior of any biological 

 organism can be entirely alien to it, for there are important 

 principles that apply to all living things. Nevertheless, 

 there are certain aspects of biological science, and more 

 particularly of psychological science, that concern edu- 

 cation much more than others, and it is these only that 

 can be touched upon in this cursory review. The present 

 discussion will therefore be limited to the following 

 topics: (1) instinctive tendencies, (2) individual 

 differences and their causes, (3) psychometric methods, 

 (4) mental development, and (5) the psychology of 

 learning. 



Instinctive Tendencies. If the purpose of education is to 

 make human behavior different from what it would be 

 without education, it is necessary to take account of what 

 original nature has given. This must be done in two direc- 

 tions: (1) we must consider instinctive tendencies, and (2) 

 we must take account of capacity to modify original 

 nature — that is, of intelligence or ability to learn. In 

 both of these types of endowment there may exist individ- 

 ual differences over and above the traits which characterize 

 human beings as such, and in the field of intelligence the 

 differences are especially important. We shall consider first 



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