Introduction to Educational Psychology for Academic Librarians
The idea for this book was generated from the authors’ conversations about the unfortunate lack of meaningful, profession-wide dialogue between educational psychologists and academic librarians. As with most academic disciplines, the degree that qualifies librarians to work in higher education requires no course work in educational psychology or pedagogy. Some library science programs offer electives in information literacy instruction. But by and large whatever exposure librarians have to the scholarship of teaching and learning occurs after school and in mostly ad-hoc ways. Many people have noted how odd this is, given how directly relevant such course work would be to teaching in higher education.
We also discussed the strengths and weaknesses of reference and instruction librarianship as a distinct form of teaching, and how librarians’ experiences can contribute to improving higher education. Our conversations also included how education policies and practices are often at odds with well-established findings in the educational psychology literature. We decided to work to bridge these gaps between theory and practice.
The purpose of this book is to introduce academic librarians to the most relevant findings from research in educational psychology. It began as a series of twelve quarterly columns published in the journal Reference Librarian. Our goal is to help increase academic librarians’ familiarity with theories, terminology, and lines of research. This in turn should help facilitate collaborations among librarians, teaching faculty, and the various offices that support student learning and teacher development on college campuses.
The chapters are designed to facilitate multiple levels of engagement. Each chapter begins with a narrative description of research findings that describe concepts and explain their importance to reference and instruction librarianship. A “Takeaways for Librarians” section in each chapter highlights main points. The annotated recommended readings provide a guide to important entry points in the literature. The reader can pick and choose their preferred depth of involvement, from skimming main ideas in the “Takeaways” to delving deep into the literature referenced in the recommended readings and works cited.
We have chosen to not include a glossary, as there are more authoritative sources for the definitions of terms and theories. We refer readers to either the thesaurus in the PsycINFO database or the American Psychological Association’s Dictionary of Psychology (https://dictionary.apa.org/).
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