UNIT 1:
Introduction to
Psychosocial issues
& Educational
psychology
Miss Zulu
Objectives of this unit
At the end of this unit students will be expected to:
❖ Define the concept Psychosocial
❖ Critically analyze Psychosocial approaches
❖ Explore Psychosocial issues in Education
❖ Explore the role and goal of Educational Psychology
Case study 1: Scared for our kids’: Pit toilets endanger South
African pupils.
Case study 4:
Outcry after learner’s braids chopped off outside school gates
● For those learners who don’t abide by the regulations, there are consequences. But for one
learner, the school year didn’t get off to a smooth start. A picture circulating on social media
showed a girl neatly dressed in her school uniform having her box braids chopped off by an
educator before entering the gate.
Defining Psychosocial
• A psychosocial approach involves the relation between intrapersonal psychological
and environmental aspects.
• Psychosocial characteristics is commonly described as an individual’s psychological
development in relation to his/her social and cultural environment.
Psychosocial approaches
● Psychosocial as a concept has been studied as a
developmental approach within the psychology
discipline.
● There are various contributors to psychosocial
approaches; psychosocial development theory is an
expansion of Sigmund Freud.
● Erik Erikson, a 20th-century psychologist and
psychoanalyst, formulated the eight-stage life cycle
theory in 1959 on the supposition that the
environment plays a critical role in self-awareness,
adjustment, human development and identity
(Woolfolk, 2019) .
Psychosocial issues in Education
● Today, human functioning is viewed in transactional terms as supported by Albert Bandura as
the product of a reciprocal interplay between person and environment,
● Most common issues include depression and anxiety (internalizing disorders), and delinquency,
aggression, educational difficulties, and truancy (externalizing disorders).
● Psychosocial issues can also show up as poor academic performance, lack of motivation in
school, loss of interest in schoolwork, or poor relationships with peers or teachers.
The role and goal of Educational
Psychology
● Educational psychology is one of the branches of applied psychology concerned with the
application of the principles, techniques and other resource of psychology to the solution of the
problems confronting the teacher attempting to direct the growth of children toward defined
objectives
● More specifically, we can say educational psychology is concerned with an understanding of:
- The child, his development, his need and his potential.
- The learning process, its nature and the ways to make it effective.
The role and goal of Educational
Psychology
● The major goal of educational psychology is to understand what happens when someone
teaches something to someone else in some setting.
● Principle- This is a term for an established relationship between two or more factors; between a
certain strategy for example and student achievement
● Theory- A tool for building better understanding of the teaching and learning process is a theory.
A theory in science is an interrelated art of concepts that is used to explain a body of data and
to make predictions about the results of future experiments
END OF UNIT 1
ANY QUESTIONS?
