Educational Psychology Is Evolving to Accommodate Technology, Multiple Disciplines, and Twenty-First-Century Skills

Authors

Arthur C. Graesser, Department of Psychology and Institute for Intelligent Systems, University of Memphis, Memphis, Tennessee 38152, USA; email: graesser@memphis.edu, jpsbtini@memphis.edu.Follow
John P. Sabatini, Department of Psychology and Institute for Intelligent Systems, University of Memphis, Memphis, Tennessee 38152, USA; email: graesser@memphis.edu, jpsbtini@memphis.edu.
Haiying Li, Department of Enrollment Research and Analytics, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa 50011, USA; email: haiyingl@iastate.edu.

Abstract

This article covers recent research activities in educational psychology that have an interdisciplinary emphasis and that accommodate twenty-first-century skills in addition to the traditional foundations of literacy, numeracy, science, reasoning (problem-solving), and academic subject matter. We emphasize digital technologies because they are capable of tracking learning data in rich detail and reliably delivering interventions that are tailored to individual learners in particular sociocultural contexts. This is a departure from inflexible pedagogical approaches that previously have been routinely adopted in most classrooms and other contexts of instruction with no precise record of learning and instructional activities. A good design of educational technology embraces the principles of learning science, identifies the basic types of learning that are needed, implements relevant technological affordances, and accommodates feedback from different stakeholders. This article covers research in literacy, collaborative problem-solving, motivation, emotion, and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) areas.

Publication Title

Annual review of psychology

Recommended Citation

Graesser, A. C., Sabatini, J. P., & Li, H. (2022). Educational Psychology Is Evolving to Accommodate Technology, Multiple Disciplines, and Twenty-First-Century Skills. Annual review of psychology, 73, 547-574. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-020821-113042