Customer Reviews

Educational Psychology

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is full of a lot of wonderful information. The best part I would have to say is the Praxis quizzes that are included in the book. I would recommend this to anyone who has not taken the praxis and would like to really understand how and why students think and do the things they do.

This book was rather ponderous, with little attempt made to make it readable. That's not the worst of it, though; that's to be expected in a psych textbook. The worst of it is, there was an unforgivable amount of sloppy editing in this book; most of it was in the first half of the book, with only one or two errors slipping through after chapter 8, but that still leaves me thoroughly unimpressed, although the book IS less sloppy than the Adolescent Psych textbook by the same author.

In general, the errors are of the typo or proofreading variety, not relevant to the subject matter, although the author does still have a tendency to confuse correlation with causation in spite of his clear disclaimers to the contrary.

Some examples of the errors that I'm speaking of:
1) At the end of chapter 2, on page 68, in the "reach your learning goals" section, under the "Developmental Issues" subheading, he speaks of the conflict between "nature and nature", rather than "nature and nurture".
2) In chapter 3, on page 83, under the subheading "Children in divorced families", second paragraph, he speaks of "...a time when parents are often in conflict with other." rather than "with EACH other".
3) Still in chapter 3, on page 94, under the subheading of "Effective schools for young adolescents", he references a report by the Carnegie Foundation which he dates as being from 1989, and then later in the paragraph, goes on to say that "twenty five years later, experts are still finding..." Given that the copyright for this book is 2009, not 2014, that just doesn't add up.
4) In the "Crack the Case" at the end of chapter 4 (page 145) question 6 asks us "What type of grouping is Mr. Adams most likely discussing?" That's awfully difficult to say, because NONE OF THE TEACHERS IN THE ANECDOTE WERE NAMED MR. ADAMS! (My suspicion is that in the first draft, there was a Mr. Adams, and in the final draft, that name was changed to add ethnic diversity to the group; perhaps "Mr. Adams" morphed into "Mr. Hassan". In any case, the change did not make it into the questions.
5) In chapter 5, page 151, second paragraph from the bottom, he references "connectectness" when he clearly means "connectedness".
6) Still in chapter 5, on page 155, in the "Through the Eyes of Teachers" interlude, we have the sentence "She visits students at home early in the school year in A EFFORT (emphasis mine) to connect with them..." Particularly ironic in an interlude dealing with attempts to improve literacy.
7) Still in chapter 5, on page 160, under the heading "Bilingualism", we are told "The ability to speak two languages has a positive effect on children's cognitive development. Children fluent in two languages perform better than their single-language counterparts on tests of control of attention, concept formation, analytical reasoning, cognitive flexibility, and cognitive complexity." Now, both of these statements MAY be correct, but the first does not necessarily follow from the second. If it is true that bilingual students perform better in all of these ways than single-language students, it MAY be because bilingualism "has a positive effect", but then again, it may simply be that students who are better at all of those things ARE MORE LIKELY TO BE ABLE TO learn a second language. Perhaps the cited study controls for that variable; Santrock says nothing to suggest this. This is a case of confusing correlation with causation, given the information in the text.
8) In chapter 8, on page 271, second full paragraph, Santrock tells us that "...in one study, 10-year olds were approximately 1.8 times slower at processing information than young adults..." and later goes on to say that 12-year olds were "approximately 1.5 times slower...". The concept of (some number) of times slower is Mathematically meaningless. If we want to speak of someone taking twice as long to do something, we say that they are "half as fast". "Twice as slow" is not a valid concept. So we can say that they took 1.8 times as long to do something, but that does not make them "1.8 times slower". That's like saying that something is 180 percent cheaper, which would mean that they would pay you 80 percent of the original price to take it off their hands.
9) In chapter 10, at the top of the page, we are told that "(Research concludes) that cooperation and postive interdependence needs to occur..." rather than "need to occur".

Now, obviously, some of these errors are more important than others; still, the fact that there are so many indicates a sloppiness that I find troubling in a textbook. Most of the information here is worthwhile, but I can't rate something with so many careless errors higher than three stars.

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