Educational psychology is the study of how people learn, including teaching methods, instructional processes, and individual differences in learning. The goal is to understand how people learn and retain information. This branch of psychology involves the learning process of early childhood and adolescence, but also the social, emotional, and cognitive processes that are involved in learning throughout the entire lifespan. The field of educational psychology incorporates a number of other disciplines, including developmental psychology, behavioral psychology, and cognitive psychology.

An example of productive struggle,An episode in which students encounter difficulty while working on a challenging task can be viewed as an opportunity for them to grapple with important mathematical ideas. Teachers can use these instances to acknowledge struggle as a natural part of learning while providing appropriate guidance and support to maintain the mathematical goals and cognitive demand of the task (Smith 2000). Research suggests that a range of teacher support and responses are possible in episodes of student struggles to advance students productively toward a resolution of understanding (Warshauer 2014). This article outlines teaching strategies that remind students of the positive aspects of struggle and student actions that indicate productive engagement toward a resolution. It concludes that by incorporating instructional approaches that acknowledge student struggles and effectively support and guide the students' thinking toward a productive resolution, students are given opportunities to strengthen their disposition toward engaging in challenging tasks. Over time, they will persist through their effort to make sense of and understand important mathematics.

Educational psychologists work with educators, administrators, teachers, and students to analyze how to help people learn best. This often involves finding ways to identify students who may need extra help, developing programs for students who are struggling, and even creating new learning methods. Many educational psychologists work with schools directly. Some are teachers or professors, while others work with teachers to try out new learning methods for their students and develop new course curricula. An educational psychologist may even become a counselor, helping students cope with learning barriers directly. In all of these roles, they can influence educational methods and help students learn in a way that best suits them.

Productive struggle also enhances students’ metacognitive self-regulation the ability to set learning goals, plan strategies to meet those goals, monitor progress, and know when and how to ask for help along the way. Critical thinking requires these types of self-regulation and thought processes. Effort and persistence matter so much because we encounter new information through our limited short-term working memory system, which focuses attention by filtering out most environmental stimuli. Motivation, persistence, and scaffolded support through targeted explanatory feedback are key elements of productive struggle.Motivation and persistence: When a learning goal is clear and the level of challenge is not too low or too high, students are more likely to be internally motivated to engage in productive struggle to achieve the goal.

Educational psychology offers valuable insights into how people learn and plays an important role in informing educational strategies and teaching methods. In addition to exploring the learning process itself, different areas of educational psychology explore the emotional, social, and cognitive factors that can influence how people learn.