Educational Psychology: A View From Within the Discipline

An academic discipline can be defined on the basis of multiple sources of evidence. In spite of various efforts over the past 20 years to assess the identity of educational psychology, professionals within the field still lack a consensual view about its role and purpose as a discipline distinct from general psychology. One measure of a discipline's identity, which none of the attempts to define educational psychology have addressed, is the training of prospective educational psychologists. Although students at any institution must respond both to an implicit, hidden curriculum and to an explicit, formal curriculum, we argue that the latter best approximates the local consensus of professionals within the field. In this study, information was collected from a broad range of schools who offer graduate degrees in educational psychology and analyzed according to curricular content, administrative organization, student autonomy, course distributions, and other requirements. In general, the data suggested three conclusions: (a) there is an apparent lack of consensus regarding the degree of specialization and diversity within the discipline, (b) that which is common among the public descriptions of graduate programs provides little evidence that educational psychology is independent from (as opposed to a subset of) the larger discipline of psychology, and (c) programs that differ in prestige differ somewhat in structure as well. Results are discussed both in terms of the positive and the negative implications of diversity within the discipline.