Telling the Stories of Educational Psychology

Abstract

In addition to understanding, prediction, and controls the goal of educational psychology is to influence practice. This requires attention to the fact that people have a preference for stories, meaningful narratives about other people and the problems that they face in every day life. It is argued that the findings and concepts of our discipline are not seen as possessing verisimilitude and rarely influence educational policy and practice because they are not well contextualized for educators. To do better, we must learn to tell stories about our research that focus on real teachers and students in ordinary school settings.