Focal Area of Educational Psychology

There are three focal areas in education that concern educational psychologist and teachers;

The learner

Learner is the most important of the three elements, not only because people are more important than processes or situations, but primarily because without the learner, there is no learning.

According to J Dewey, unless someone is learning, three is no teaching, just as there is no selling unless someone is buying.

The word learner we mean the student who individually and collectively comprise the class. A great deal of what happens in the classroom can be explained in terms of the personalities, developmental stages, and psychological problems of students in the class.

The learning process

The process by which people changes their behavior, improve performance, reorganize their thinking or become familiar with new concepts and information. By the learning process we mean whatever people do when they learn. What they do include behavior that is not directly observable, such as perceiving, thinking, remembering and identifying as well as behavior that can directly observed such as writing computing, attending and talking. Learning is always going on; it is a process begins at birth and continues in some form or other throughout our lives.
Most of what we learn, even as children, is not acquired in the classroom. We learn to have attitudes toward and feeling about ourselves and others; we learn to be the kinks of people we become. To be sure, they may not be learning the subject matter of the curriculum, but they are learning something. Sometimes they learn thing that are irrelevant or even undesirable.

The learning situation;
The learning situation refers to the environment in which learners find themselves and in which the learning process takes place. Some aspects of the environment may be immediate, such as the classroom in which students are applying themselves to the tasks of learning. The learning situation refers to any factor or condition that affects the learner or learning process. The teacher is one element in the learning situation. So is the classroom setting; the effectiveness of the ventilation systems, the afternoon light that shines in the eyes of the students and makes them sleepy, the noise of the school band practicing down the hall, the arrangement of seats, and so forth. But the most significant factors involve people; the attitudes and behavior of the teacher, the morale of the class, the emotional climate of the school and so forth. Other significant factors are more elusive. Indeed, we might be inclined to overlook them, if educational psychologists had not shown them to be important.