Method - a way of research or a
way of knowing reality. Each science has its own methods and systems of techniques and operations, which are used in the study of any phenomena.
The methods of educational psychology are the same as in related humanities. Nevertheless, it should be said that experiment and observation are fundamental.
Observation is a deliberate, with a specific purpose and performed in the system perception of the external manifestation of human actions, followed by analysis and explanation of behavior.
An experiment is the systematic manipulation of one or more factors and the recording of changes in the behavior of the object of study.
Conventionally, the methods of educational psychology can be divided into 2 groups: methods for organizing research and collecting information. The first includes longitudinal research, comparative and integrated methods. The second - observation, experiment, questionnaires, testing, interviews, clinical and standardized conversation.
Considering the methods of pedagogical psychology in more detail, such as collecting information, it should be said that testing represents questions and tasks reduced to certain standards, which have a certain scale of values. Tests are used to bring individual differences to a standard. There are some requirements for this method of collecting information :
- age norm;
- objectivity;
- validity;
- reliability.
Tests as methods of developmental and educational psychology are represented by several types:
- achievement tests that diagnose the possession of knowledge, skills and abilities;
- intelligence tests that reveal mental potential;
- creativity tests that study and evaluate creative abilities;
- criteria-oriented, which reveal the possession of ZUNs, necessary and sufficient to fulfill certain professional or educational tasks;
- personal - the measurement of various aspects of the personality;
- projective techniques - those that study personality, based on the psychological interpretation of the obtained projection results;
- scaling - a method of modeling real processes using systems of numbers and coordinates.
The subject and methods of pedagogical psychology differ from the actual psychological only in that they study the laws of education and training, using the categorical and instrumental apparatuses of other, related sciences. Two groups of methods are added, since they have a significant impact on the development of the child: this is psychological counseling and psychological correction.
The consultation form can be either individual or group; the client is the child or his legal representatives. Correctional and developmental classes are also held in various forms, if we are talking about a preschool child, then a game is selected in which he learns new skills.
In working with children, such methods of pedagogical psychology are used as the study of the products of activity - we are talking about checking essays and examinations to find out how much the studied material was learned, questionnaires that reveal the motives of learning.