Psychology is the scientific study of behaviour and mental processes of

human beings. As a field of study, it is made up of many parts because in

most of the things that human do, they will require this discipline because
it helps to understand how they behave. General psychology can be
defined in this way and educational psychology which is one of the sub
fields of psychology can be defined as a branch of psychology that studies
human behaviour in educational settings (guy lefrancois 2011). A concept
is an abstract idea. Soanes .C, Stevenson. A (n.d). This chapter is going
to look at the concepts of both general and educational psychology.

Human nature is the concept of general psychology saying that there is a

collection of characteristic’s which show rational thought, these include a
person’s ideas, their emotional state and the way they do things. These
are things that human beings have in common, if there happens an action
that is out of this context or something that is not perceived to be logical
or logically possible to humans, this is not considered to be part of human
nature. For example humans will consider it to be abnormal if someone
had to run for 180km/s. linkedin corporation(2011)

General psychology covers so many concepts and another of these is the

concept of perception which is usually found in cognitive psychology.
Perception can be defined as the way of regarding or understanding
something. Different people perceive things in a different way and
sometimes might even perceive the message being sent in a wrong way.
An example of perception is if someone says jump, the series of actions
that will take place in the mind of the one being told to do so in an
attempt to interpret it is perception, there are many other concepts
however that are related to perception auditory localization which deals
with the location of sound in an environment, among this are ames room,
barognosis, colour blindness etc.

Loneliness is another concept found in general psychology. It can be

defined as an emotional state where an individual feels disconnected and

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as a result feel sad and wish they had better social relationships. From
this definition, a person being lonely is not necessarily considered to the
the same as the one in isolation like for example if someone chooses to
isolate themselves and feel okay and comfortable with it, they are not
considered to be lonely but if at some point they just feel disconnected
and like they are missing something and there is need for something
better relationship wise then they are considered to be lonely. According
to mikluciner & seagal’s research, there are different feelings affiliated
with loneliness like self-pity, helplessness, boredom etc. and the one
which carries a large percentage among these is self-pity. Loneliness can
be caused by things like situations like if one goes to a new place or
sometimes the reason might be personal like if someone is shy and
sometimes the reason might be a combination of the two for example if a
person doesn’t share the same thoughts as those around them. According
to Rokach, one of the ways people can effectively deal with loneliness is
by means of self-reflection.

Another concept associated with general psychology is the concept of

teamwork. Teamwork can be defined as doing work collectively as a
whole productively with minimum wasted effort and in a harmonious way.
In a teamwork, the goal is to provide more man power to a task in order
to simplify it and everyone in the group has to participate. For example a
study group at school, in this group if they are given an assignment
containing five questions and they are five of them, they might just divide
the questions so that everyone can solve a question in order to save time
and bring their work together at the end of the day.

Metacognition is another concept concerned with general psychology,

metacognition involves the awareness and interpretation one gets about
their mental actions or the way they acquire knowledge through thoughts,
experiences and senses. This concept could be very good at solving
problems as it critically assess the problem and looks at ways in which the
problem can be approached and solved efficiently. It can be used as a

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way of controlling ones thoughts. An example of metacognition could be a
person becoming aware of the way they can best learn.

Priming is another of the concepts and may involve the way someone
behaves or their ability to make considered decisions or form sensible
opinions. Psychology concepts

Educational psychology also has concepts and among these is operant

conditioning which is a series of changes attempting to change behaviour
by providing either positive or negative support, in this; the person
connects a particular action to the consequence it carries, an example of
this could be a school awarding the best students at their school with
different variables depending on their achievement’s and in this, the
student will know that if they get very good marks, they will be awarded
by the school and if they get average or very bad marks, there will be no
form of awarding.

Another concept in educational psychology is the instruction which

requires the asking of information and this can be called discovery
learning. James bruner (1915 contributed to this concept). In this one,
the learner makes a combination of past experiences together with the
new ones, the ones supporting this concept say that it promotes a lot of
things among which is the encouragement of active participation or
involvement, motivation and responsibility. However, there are also some
who criticise and discourage this theory saying it brings about an excess
of cognition and that it makes it hard for teachers to discern problems.

Elaboration theory is the theory that directs a pattern or design and it

argues that what is to be learnt has to be arranged in a systematic
manner starting from the simple things ending with the most complex in
order to connect the previous with the new knowledge.

Another of the concepts under educational psychology is GRIT which

can be defined as the distinct attribute possessed by the learners which

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enables them to continue in their course of action when facing struggles
and blockages along the way. This theory was promoted by Angela
Duckworth, Michael .d Mathews, Dennis. R Kelly and Christopher
Petersen.

Cognitive dissonance is the one that happens when the individuals belief’s
do not collaret with their conduct. In order to reduce this, they have the
option of reducing either of the two in order to balance up, if none of
these takes place then it cannot be gotten rid of.

Another of the concepts of educational psychology is Anchored instruction

in which an anchor, a piece of cloth a fabric or media is used to give
better understanding to the minds of the learners, usually this is
discussed and included in the curriculum and this usually involves the use
of video which is enticing to the learners n order to keep them interested
so that they learn something out of the topic and they don’t bring what
the students don’t have a background about but at least what they have
some past knowledge of.

Situated learning theory makes a statement that gaining new

knowledge is not planned or meant for and is placed in a genuine context,
activity and culture.

Problem based learning is the type of learning which in the process for
learning focuses itself on the problems that could be faced in the learning
process. Those teaching are the ones who use this method to try and find
and fix the problems, in this theory, the students direct themselves in
collaborative groups and when the problem is actually identified, they look
for a solution which everyone is consistent with and have the same
opinion, problem based learning discourages memorizing of a topic, in this
one, he students have to get the concepts from what they are taught and
apply them to new situations to show their understanding and teachers
are the ones who facilitate this. The ones that back this theory of learning
claim that it enhances critical thinking and makes creative learners and

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those with very bad methods of solving problems take a notch above and
improve and this will help them to solve world problems that relate to
what they have learnt.

Semiotics is the theory which studies the way people make meaning from
both foreign and non-foreign ways. In this theory, people cannot
understand the language for example but from the signs and gestures
they will be able to tell what the person they are communicating to is
trying to say and people make meanings of certain symbols through
agreement for them to be called or described in a certain way.

Multiliteracies is another of the psychological concepts and teaching

approach of education and its aim is to bring about learning which is very
much cultural and involving a lot of language and conveyance of
information, it was formed and promoted by the London group in about
fourteen years ago and according to them, it helps to prepare the children
for the world ahead which is very diverse.

Information processing is the theory which looks at the processes that

take place in the procession of information in the learning process, this
theory compares the human mind to that of a computer and is against the
behaviourist concepts or ideas of people responding to stimuli. Learning
theories plain English volume 1 of 2

These concepts play a very vital role in psychology by trying to

understand humans, in educational psychology for example the concepts
in there can be used at schools and any institution partaking education.
General psychology also can use the concepts contained in it to try and
understand the general human behaviour hence without these concepts it
would be hard to understand psychology because they are like a drive to
a specific part of psychology and can help them to understand the relation
of two or more things

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