Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [404]
Educational psychology: By the 1960s, psychologists and educators had amassed evidence that disadvantaged children are cognitively and culturally ill-prepared for school, and that this is why they fall farther behind other children year by year. Head Start, begun in the 1960s as part of President Johnson’s War on Poverty, was a large-scale experiment intended to offset the learning difficulties of poor children by giving them special education to supply the skills and background they need to succeed in school.
But for political reasons Head Start was launched hurriedly, without plans for properly assessing its effects. Only after the program had been running for some years did Congress ask to have it evaluated. Researchers then compared a number of first-, second-, and third-grade children who had taken part in Head Start with similar children who had not, and found, distressingly, that the Head Start students were doing no better in school than the others. The finding touched off a raging controversy. Defenders of the program said that the two groups were not really equivalent—that Head Start had attracted those who needed it most and would have done even worse without it. Attackers said the program had proven that compensatory special education had no lasting effect and that the children’s poor environment prevailed.10
The debate continued year after year, with some studies reporting success and others reporting failure, and with other programs designed by researchers rather than social activists yielding more hopeful data. By 1982, the pooled findings of eleven well-designed studies of early enrichment programs showed that children in the programs had done better than the control groups of comparable children and had scored higher on IQ tests for several years.11 Unfortunately, the gains were not permanent, and for a fundamental reason: after three decades of experience, a careful summary of the evidence yielded a mixed finding and an explanation:
The empirical literature… delivers good news and bad news. The bad news is that neither Head Start nor any preschool program can inoculate children against the ravages of poverty. Early intervention simply cannot overpower the effects of poor living conditions, inadequate nutrition and health care, negative role models, and substandard schools. But good programs can prepare children for school and possibly help them develop better coping and adaptation skills that will enable better life outcomes, albeit not perfect ones.12
In many other ways and on a far larger scale, psychology has been applied in education for several decades. We have already seen most of them and can pass by with a summary note of how things stand today: Throughout the nation some 25,000 school psychologists test and assess students and provide short-term therapy, and several thousand educational psychologists use learning theory and research data to design effective teaching methods and teach them to students in teachers’ colleges.
Human engineering: Early in the century, engineers who designed machinery, automobiles, appliances, and other mechanical devices occasionally gave thought to making the controls and gauges of the equipment fit natural human perceptual and motor capabilities. Even in early automobiles, for instance, the steering wheel was linked to the front wheels in such a way that to turn left, the driver turned the wheel to the left. This may seem an obvious design, but the very first automobiles were steered by a tiller, which the driver had to push to the right to make the car turn to the left, and vice versa. Similarly, some designers tried, on an intuitive basis, to make the dials and controls of radios, power tools, and factory machinery operate in what felt like a natural way.
But as long as this was left to engineers—as was largely the case until World War II—a