Personality Development & Learning: A Reader

This reader is designed to accompany the Open University course E206, Personality, Development and Learning. The readings look at important psychological approaches and their interaction with education, covering enduring themes, new developments and contemporary practice. The book is divided into four sections. The first starts with a consideration of the way historical changes in attitudes to child rearing affect theories about how children develop, followed by a series of readings which explore both the universal characteristics of child development and sources of individual variation. The second section is concerned with the nature of learning, and the readings in the third section deal with important areas of personality and the self. These are linked with the problems of disruptive and maladjusted children. The final section of the book looks specifically at the impact psychology has had on educational policies and practices, exploring ways of measuring abilities, psychological explanations of success and failure, and curriculum innovations directly based on psychological theories.