Educational Psychology Review最新文献

Whether schools help or hinder creativity is a topic of vibrant, international debate. Some contend that the focus on structure, rote learning and standardised assessments associated with formal education stifles children’s creativity. Others argue that creativity, much like numeracy or literacy, is a skill that can be taught, and educational settings provide optimal contexts for children to learn creative skills. With creativity increasingly recognised as a critical skill of the twenty-first century and formal education reaching more children across the globe, understanding the impact of schools on its development is critical. We suggest that much of the discourse on this topic has a narrow focus, precluding a global perspective. Here, we take a step back to integrate important but disparately presented research strands on education and creativity, to inform this debate. We first synthesize what we know about creativity and education, before presenting work on different areas—either directly or indirectly assessing creativity in educational contexts—including the relationship between creativity and academic achievement, classroom infrastructure and experiences, developmental slumps, teachers’ perspectives on creative children and research on culturally and educationally diverse populations. Reviewing research from these approaches shows that the relationship is nuanced and requires careful interpretation—while some research showcases the positive impact schooling can have on children’s creative development, other work, including from culturally and educationally diverse populations, shows how school experiences could be detrimental in this regard. We finish by summarising and integrating these research strands before making suggestions for future research.

The widespread benefits of creativity have become more salient in recent years. This has led to scholarly interest in finding ways to foster creativity. Nature immersion may be one way to enhance creativity, particularly as many individuals involved in creative pursuits have found nature to be a source of inspiration and a haven for restoration. Using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses (PRISMA) extension for scoping reviews and the PRISMA-ScR 22 item checklist, we conducted a scoping review to examine the evidence on the relationship between nature and creativity as well as any underlying mechanisms facilitating this relationship. A scoping review was deemed appropriate given the infancy of the topic and the need to understand the broad landscape. Our aim was to present a range of interdisciplinary applications of nature interventions on different types of creative performance. We found 45 publications exploring the relationship between nature and creativity, with the majority (n = 36, 80%) published within the past seven years. Overall, the quantitative studies in our scoping review provided evidence of a significant positive relationship, or effect, between nature and creativity. These relationships held across various types of nature including for wilderness, rural and urban settings, as well as in different applications of creativity such as in the arts, workplace, education, and laboratory conditions. Qualitative and case study research also supported the positive relationship between nature and creativity including in diverse nature settings and in different applications such as in visual arts, design, writing, music, free play in kindergartens, and work. Qualitative studies highlighted potential mechanisms behind this relationship, including time in solitude, appreciation of impermanence, relaxation and inspiration, and disconnection from technology. Moreover, the degree of exposure to nature may be an important consideration for creative performance with more immersive, real-life experiences typical of outdoor nature, tending to be more effective than indoor spaces with window views or indoor plants. These preliminary findings suggest that more opportunities to connect with nature, especially in the outdoors, may help to stimulate creativity in a wide range of settings including education, the creative arts, and workplaces, although more high-quality research examining the sustained effects of nature on creativity is needed.

Throughout 2023 and 2024, we served as co-guest editors of a topical collection in Educational Psychology Review on The Past, Present, and Future of Theory Development in Educational Psychology. In this topical collection, authors of prominent theories in the field were invited to reflect upon how they generated, developed, and iterated their ideas, as well as what the future might hold for their theories. Our hope was these articles could serve as examples of how theory building happens, normalizations of the often difficult and circuitous paths theories can take from initial observations to formalizations, and inspirations to others to begin their own theory development journey. In this reflection on the topical collection, we present themes that emerged as we curated the articles, including themes we anticipated (e.g., the many different ways theories can be generated) as well as ones we did not (e.g., the mix of boldness and intellectual humility theory generation requires). Also, we examine the epistemic virtues our authors used to evaluate their theories, such as practicality, as well as the virtues that were less commonly mentioned, such as internal consistency. Finally, we identify future directions for theory development in educational psychology, including the need to improve the climate for theory development in the field, particularly in terms of creating structures that incentivize and reward natural history work.

Promoting children’s and adolescents’ mental, physical, and social wellbeing is highly important to help them learn, create social connections, and stay healthy. Nature has the potential to restore cognition, reduce stress and mental fatigue, and improve wellbeing, all factors that are conducive to learning. There is growing interest in understanding the effects of nature on the wellbeing of children and adolescents, particularly in the school context. This paper presents a PRISMA-guided systematic review of the literature examining the effects of school-led nature interventions on the mental, physical, and social wellbeing of school children and adolescents aged 5 to 19 years. Examples of school-led nature interventions include outdoor learning, walks in nature and green schoolyards. Experimental and quasi-experimental studies employing quantitative measures were selected, yielding 19 studies from 17 papers. Included studies were rated as being of high (n = 6) and moderate quality (n = 13). The results provide some evidence that nature exposure in the school context can improve the wellbeing of children and adolescents, particularly their positive affect, physical activity, and social relationships/interactions. The wellbeing effects of school-led nature interventions were also examined according to age and gender, with results indicating a gender effect, but inconclusive findings for age. Findings from this review support the integration of nature in schools to enhance the mental, physical and social wellbeing of children and adolescents.

Systematic reviews are a time-consuming yet effective approach to understanding research trends. While researchers have investigated how to speed up the process of screening studies for potential inclusion, few have focused on to what extent we can use algorithms to extract data instead of human coders. In this study, we explore to what extent analyses and algorithms can produce results similar to human data extraction during a scoping review—a type of systematic review aimed at understanding the nature of the field rather than the efficacy of an intervention—in the context of a never before analyzed sample of studies that were intended for a scoping review. Specifically, we tested five approaches: bibliometric analysis with VOSviewer, latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) with bag of words, k-means clustering with TF-IDF, Sentence-BERT, or SPECTER, hierarchical clustering with Sentence-BERT, and BERTopic. Our results showed that topic modeling approaches (LDA/BERTopic) and k-means clustering identified specific, but often narrow research areas, leaving a substantial portion of the sample unclassified or in unclear topics. Meanwhile, bibliometric analysis and hierarchical clustering with SBERT were more informative for our purposes, identifying key author networks and categorizing studies into distinct themes as well as reflecting the relationships between themes, respectively. Overall, we highlight the capabilities and limitations of each method and discuss how these techniques can complement traditional human data extraction methods. We conclude that the analyses tested here likely cannot fully replace human data extraction in scoping reviews but serve as valuable supplements.

Achievement goals have been key concepts for describing what motivates individuals in educational contexts. While achievement goals have often merely been conceptualized in terms of aspired end-states (aims of goal striving), contemporary research has proposed a more holistic perspective synthesizing these aims alongside autonomous versus controlled reasons derived from Self-Determination Theory into so-called achievement goal complexes. How these aims and reasons align is a matter of further discussion. An overview of empirical studies on goal complexes as well as associations between achievement goals and overarching goal systems reveals that aims differ in whether they show strong communality (static goal regulation) or rather high situational fluctuation regarding underlying reasons (dynamic goal regulation). Particularly, mastery aims show primarily strong bounds with autonomous reasons, whereas performance aims are more ambiguously aligned with underlying reasons. This has implications for the development of an overarching theory as well as for educational practice aiming to foster certain goals and goal complexes. Potential avenues for future research such as further investigations into goal valence, a broader set of aims, the impact of culture, and goal development are discussed.

This meta-analytical review aims to investigate the overall effect of comprehensive interventions on teacher well-being and the factors that moderate the effect by synthesizing empirical evidence. A total number of 176 effect sizes from 44 studies were included in this study. The results reported the mean effect size of intervention on teacher well-being was significant (g = 0.35). The study quality (F = 5.38, p < .01), intervention type (F = 3.03, p < .05), and intervention duration (F = 2.80, p < .05) were identified as the statistically significant moderators for the overall effect. The further multiple moderator model reported a significant outcome (F = 2.91, p < .01). This study is the first attempt to synthesize the impact of the intervention on teacher well-being using a three-level model. Conceptual, methodological, and practical implications were provided and particular guidelines for professionals and education policy makers to better promote teacher wellness were also presented. 

Single-case experimental designs (SCEDs) have a long history in clinical and educational disciplines. One underdeveloped area in advancing SCED design and analysis is understanding the process of how internal validity threats and operational concerns are avoided or mitigated. Two strategies to ameliorate such issues in SCED involve replication and randomization. Although replication and randomization are indispensable tools in improving the internal validity of SCEDs, little attention has been paid to (a) why this is the case; or (b) the ways in which these design features are not immune from internal validity threats and operational concerns. In the current paper, we describe the use of directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) to better understand, discover, and mitigate internal validity threats and operational concerns in SCEDs. DAGs are a tool for visualizing causal relations among variables and can help researchers identify both causal and noncausal relations among their variables according to specific algorithms. We introduce the use of DAGs in SCEDs to prompt applied researchers to conceptualize internal validity threats and operational concerns, even when an SCED includes replication and randomization in the design structure. We discuss the general principles of causal inference in conventional “group” designs and in SCEDs, the unique factors impacting SCEDs, and how DAGs can be incorporated into SCEDs. We also discuss the limitations of DAGs applied to SCEDs, as well as future directions for this area of work.

Childhood and adolescence are pivotal developmental stages for psychological health. An understanding of psychological mechanisms related to well-being is important for promoting positive life outcomes for youth. Research generally shows that the basic psychological need for autonomy is significantly associated with well-being. To examine the magnitude and sources of variation in this relationship, we conducted a meta-analysis of 90 reports to analyze the average effect of autonomy need satisfaction (ANS) and frustration (ANF) on indicators of psychological well- and ill-being for K-12 (Kindergarten to 12th grade) youth. Results indicated that ANS was positively associated with psychological well-being and negatively associated with psychological ill-being among youth. Further, ANF was negatively associated with psychological well-being and positively associated with psychological ill-being. Moderator analyses indicated that the association between ANS and well-being was stronger for studies conducted with children and adolescents in East Asian countries compared to studies conducted in the USA, Canada, or Northern Europe when controlling for publication status and measurement reliability. Results also showed that the average correlation between ANS and well-being was stronger for studies located in more collectivistic countries compared to individualistic countries when controlling for publication status and measurement reliability. The relationship between ANS and ill-being was stronger for studies conducted in the USA and Canada compared to East Asian and European contexts. Together, results suggest that autonomy satisfaction is related to the well- and ill-being of youth across cultural contexts, but that there is cultural variation in the association between experiences of autonomy and well-being.

Unproctored and teacher-proctored exams have been widely used to prevent cheating at many universities worldwide. However, no empirical studies have directly compared their effectiveness in promoting academic integrity in actual exams. To address this significant gap, in four preregistered field studies, we examined the effectiveness of unproctored and teacher-proctored exam formats in deterring cheating behavior among university students and the role of academic integrity reminders. All four studies used a double-blind, randomized, controlled design. Before taking an exam, students were randomly assigned to take either an unproctored condition or a teacher-proctored exam, with or without receiving an academic integrity reminder. We found that the unproctored exam format is significantly more effective in reducing cheating than the teacher-proctored exam format and adding academic integrity reminders before the exams significantly reduces cheating. These findings demonstrate that incorporating unproctored exams and pre-exam academic integrity reminders into a university’s assessment practices may be a useful strategy for reducing academic dishonesty and upholding assessment validity.