Cognitive load theory has been in development since the 1980s. Much of the impetus for that development has come from firstly, replication failures using randomised controlled trials and secondly, from the incorporation of other theories into cognitive load theory. Both have led to theory expansion. The immediate cause of the so-called…

How do researchers of cognitive development work to make sure that our field evolves so that our contribution to humanity is emancipatory? We can take inspiration from researchers near and far. Inspiration may be found in other areas of psychological research (social, cultural, etc.) and other social sciences (public health, sociology, etc.).…

As a community of practice, educational psychologists are unpracticed in considering how educational policies might affect the phenomena they study. One reason is the traditional focus of educational psychology research on cross-contextual individual processes, to the practical exclusion of the political context that frames teaching, learning,…

Latent class models with covariates are widely used for psychological, social, and educational research. Yet the fundamental identifiability issue of these models has not been fully addressed. Among the previous research on the identifiability of latent class models with covariates, Huang and Bandeen-Roche (Psychometrika 69:5-32, 2004) studied the…

The idea that certain outdoor education (OE) programs consistently improve character traits has been a recurring theme not only in OE practice but also in some approaches to research and theory (Brookes, 2003a, 2003b). Sometimes referred to as "character building," such approaches to OE persist although perhaps less prominently than in…

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has become a major research trend in the fields of education and psychology. However, several risks posed by this technology concerning the cognitive and socio-emotional development of children and adolescents have been identified. While it would be highly useful to have a clear understanding of these…

In this article, we introduce this second special issue on the assessment of perfectionism along with an overview of developments in the perfectionism field over the past 30 years following the shift to studying perfectionism as a multidimensional construct. We examine some key contributions over the past decade, including the proliferation of…

The field of school psychology, built on a foundation of evidence-based practice, has produced an abundance of research to inform school-based practice. However, this empirical tradition has not been applied to the predominant activity in which school psychologists are engaged: psychoeducational assessment. Despite numerous critiques and proposed…

Preregistration and registered reports are two promising open science practices for increasing transparency in the scientific process. In particular, they create transparency around one of the most consequential distinctions in research design: the data analytics decisions made before data collection and post-hoc decisions made afterwards.…

Children's block building has long been a focus of psychological research, in part because block building skills are thought to be useful indicators of other abilities such as representational thinking. Block building skills are assumed to progress through developmental stages and a number of measures have been developed to assess these skills. In…

This article argues that ordinary virtue trait attributions presuppose the existence of "realistic" traits that fall short of, for example, Aristotelian ideals and that debate about the existence of virtue traits should be reoriented in the light of this fact. After clarifying and motivating that basic thesis, we discuss what the…

The author comments on Noel Entwistle's paper "Contributions of Educational Psychology to Understanding Student Learning: What Has Been Discovered -- What More Could Be Done?" He begins the article by expressing his delight because he feels Entwistle's work has been a beacon in the understanding of student learning and his contributions…

In this paper, we discuss the historical relationship between empathy and reasoning from a historical and philosophical (continental and Western philosophy) point of view. We explain how empathy has lost its original aesthetic connotations through its journey from one language and culture to another. Nowadays, we often find a quite reduced…

Immersive virtual reality (VR) carries important potential, both for the creation of scientific knowledge and also for its communication. This is particularly important for studies of human spatial cognition, where psychologists now possess the power to combine the scale and fidelity of the real world with the malleability and control of the…

Within the field of history of education, there is a growing interest in the movement of influential actors and texts that have crossed national borders. One of the main driving forces for influence, knowledge, and innovation is comparison, a tool used within the governing of education in diverse ways and with different intensities, over time, to…