Finding educational theories

You may have had a lot of questions recently from students looking for educational theories in psychology. These are Psych 261 (Psychological development and classroom processes) students who have to find an educational theory and then find an empirical study article that uses that theory. Unfortunately there really isn’t an index that I know of that lists educational psychology theories. There are, however, a few books that I found that could be particularly useful. They tend to be in the LB 1050-1060 or the BF 316-20 areas. Many of these books have the following subject heading applied to them: Learning, Psychology of. There are a few books that I thought could be particularly useful in giving the overview that these students need (if they choose not to use their textbook) are Theories of Learning (LB 1051 .H52 1981), An Introduction to Theories of Learning (LB 1060 .H42 1997), Theories of learning: A comparative Approach (BF 318 .T48) and Learning Theories: A to Z (LB 15 .L4695 2002). The last one, is also available as an ebook and does a fairly good job providing information on who came up with the theory and what year. Unfortunately their bibliography is only a selective list of books and articles, but it’s a start. Of course, the student is going to have to know what theory they’re looking for rather than a vague “I need a theory on X” but it could be a useful starting point and may even warrant being moved into reference from the stacks. The only way I found these books was by going up to the stacks and browsing the shelves and looking for books that had theory in them. Unfortunately “education theories” doesn’t really come up with what these students are looking for, so your best bet is to type in “learning theory(ies)” in the keyword search to find some, or to use the subject heading above.

Finding an empirical article in PsycInfo is the next step that I’d take and since you can limit to empirical articles, I think typing in the theory and using that limit would probably produce the best results. That's the easier of the two steps and probably isn't worth detailing much here.