Today I will be reflecting on a two-part question dealing with educational psychology.
The first question: What is the relationship between research and teaching (practice) in education? How can you use information literacy to evaluate and select information about students and teaching? What does this mean for your future career?
As far as teachers and researchers go, I feel that the relationship between research and teaching is separate, but indirectly related as well. What do I mean by this? In this instance here are professionals whose jobs are to either teach, or to do research on educational phenomena, but not both at the same time. So, in this sense, researchers and teachers are separated by the fact that they have different occupations that use different processes. The teacher is trying to help the students learn/understand material, while the researcher is trying to analyze data from the classroom or school that they are observing. While researchers and teachers obviously have different occupations, they both have the same long-term goal in mind: Which is to teach students more effectively. This can be seen from the indirect relationship that researchers and teachers have. For instance, a researcher goes out into the field to observe and analyze some phenomena in education. After the researcher finishes their experiment and acquires all of the data, they usually write about their observations and publish it in a journal somewhere. From there, teachers can read and learn about the data that the researchers collected. Then teachers have the decision to take the information that they learned, and apply it to their classroom to try and create the most effective space for students to learn. From the information that I talked about above, I have decided that if I become a teacher one day, I will do my best to look into pertinent research articles that could help me acquire better teaching methods for the classroom.
Now for the second question: What do you think about homework for the topic and level of students you intend on teaching?
I feel that
I agree that the researcher and teacher are indirectly related. The way I see it is that teachers came first, when someone wanted to see how effective teachers were they started to look at data to see what teaching strategies were effective and which weren’t. So basically researchers are the ones that process the hard data and inform teachers what is working best to best benefit their students, preparing the next generation of educators to be even better than the last. Another way of wording it could be analyzing. If we didn’t have researchers, then we would stay at the same basic educational level.