June 2003
Volume 16, Number 6
Lyn Corno is a program advisor in the department of curriculum and teaching at Teachers College, Columbia University. She received her PhD in 1978 from Stanford University. Her work is focused on aspects of educational psychology.
I entered the field of educational psychology in 1978 with a PhD from Stanford University. The School of Education at Stanford has a program in psychological studies that requires a cognate in the department of psychology. I also earned a master's in curriculum and teacher education while at Stanford. In the program of empirical research that ensued from my studies, I focused on connections between classroom teaching processes and student learning and motivation.
Presently, I am an educational psychologist in a department of curriculum and teaching at Teachers College, Columbia University. The College offers graduate degrees in applied psychology, education, and health sciences. Some of the former faculty are professors whose work shaped the field of curriculum theory, including John Dewey, Harold Rugg, Hollis Caswell, and, more recently, A. Harry Passow.
Prior to my arrival at Teachers College in 1982, the only psychologically-minded professor in the curriculum and teaching department was Arno Bellack, who was retiring.
I've always felt a bit like a fish out of water in the department because curriculum theorists tend to view educational psychologists as overly positivistic and quantitative. Educational psychologists are scientific and seek understandings grounded in empirical research. With its emphasis on valid evidence in support of claims about teaching, learning, or other processes, theory in educational psychology reads differently than contemporary post-modern, critical theory or hermeneutics. It reads differently also from the early philosophy of education upon which most curriculum theory was founded. For curriculum theorists, educational psychology is too analytic and probabilistic; its descriptions of educational processes and outcomes are "thin." And, although curricularists nod at attempts by psychologists to investigate stable relations among abstract constructs, generalizations from research are considered unrealistic. Thus, although my presence at Teachers College in 1982 raised some issues to be addressed with my department through the years, ultimately, my colleagues and I grew from our collaboration, each a little closer to the other's point of view.
Wonderful students sought me out for courses and advice over the years, often those who wanted to use empirical methods to study teaching, such as true experimental designs, and those with research questions about classroom learning and motivation. Several of these students have gone on to have important professional careers in the private sector, as well as in academic teaching and professional K-12 education.
With this combination of interests and experiences, I have been fortunate enough to develop a body of work in the area of self-regulated learning providing professional opportunities of many different types. I spent several summers serving as a consultant to a large computer company that was heavily invested in customer training and the development of computer-based self-instructional systems. I validated aptitude tests for systems engineers and taught instructors in customer education about curriculum and instructional theory and existing research on teaching. I enjoyed opportunities doing nationally-televised interviews on what research, including some of my own, tells us about the subject of homework and student responsibility.
In recent years, I have chaired the board of the National Society for the Study of Education, a small, century-old organization that produces critical and historically-based yearbooks on timely topics in education, broadly construed. Another board on which I served and chaired is the visiting panel for educational research at the Educational Testing Service. The panel reviews and advises ETS research scientists on many aspects of their learning and assessment projects, including measures of motivational and volitional processes.
The more conventional activities I have pursued include editing peer-reviewed academic journals, including the American Educational Research Journal, the Educational Psychologist, and the Teachers College Record. Most of my work these days is done on the Internet, where I continue to advise doctoral students earning degrees in curriculum and teaching, edit, and work collaboratively in research and writing projects.
I do not think I would have had such a diverse array of opportunities to contribute meaningfully to the field of education had I pursued a more traditional professional path in a department consisting only of psychologists. I have learned that the best educational research is multidisciplinary, and even curriculum theorists appreciate the value of psychological studies to help demystify some of the fundamental processes of teaching and learning.
