Educational psychology is also concerned with the dynamics of learning. In his contribution to this course, George Reese analyzes by way of example through one of the notions of productive struggles. First of all, educational psychology focuses more on the study of how people learn, such as student outcomes, instructional processes, individual differences during learning, and many more. Psychologists who focus on this field tend to study more on how people are able to absorb and retain new information being presented to them. Educational psychology helps us understand the processes of learning because psychologists are heavily involved in early childhood to adolescence and how one's ability to learn evolves inside and outside of school. Additionally, educational psychologists apply different theories towards human development to be able to understand individual learning and inform the instructional process. They also study how people learn in a variety of settings and identify the various approaches and strategies to make learning more effective.

In the field of educational psychology, productive struggle is one of the most effective strategies in which individuals could learn with minimal guidance, which is always the key into developing one's independent learning. Productive struggle is known to be the effortful learning that is able to instill grit and creative problem solving into a person. Through productive struggle, students are able to create their own personalized goals, think of strategies in which they will be able to achieve those goals, monitor their own learning process, and coming up with their final solutions to their goals. This is very important because it boosts one's confidence and resilience to any problem they may face. Furthermore, productive struggles also enhances students' metacognitive self-regulation which is very crucial in terms of critical thinking as it requires a step by step process in which students will be capable of doing when able to see their own progress in learning. Therefore, productive learning in educational psychology helps us understand the processes of learning because it focuses on the stages in which one goes through when given a problem in which they need to solve with minimal guidance from another.

Quantitative psychologists study and develop methods for measuring human behavior. Their work involves the use of statistical methods, research methodologies, the modeling of psychological processes, and data analysis of psychological data.

Its use frequently involves the application of quantitative methods such as simulation, advanced statistics, and data mining of large-scale, secondary data sets to study classroom learning, educational policies, programs, and interventions developed to promote student learning. This was illustrated well by the presentations in our course materials by Dr. Cimpian on their quantitative analyses of policy changes for the reclassification of English language learners. For this, Dr. Cimpian and colleagues applied regression discontinuity and instrumental variable methods to student outcome data.

The benefits of applying quantitative methods of educational psychology are numerous. They enable a level or granularity of analysis that enables testing of the hypotheses, patterns, or insights generated from qualitative research - which focuses on concepts or experiences and produces data more often in narrative form. Also, it is often easier for other researchers to evaluate, build upon, or try to replicate quantitative research results in later studies. Since it produces numeric data, results can be more easily compared, rigorously tested, and validated by others more readily. This makes quantitative results very compelling in proving or disproving theories about education. Quantitative approaches also offer techniques for analyzing very large datasets, or combinations of large data. This can be very hard and hugely time-consuming using a qualitative research approach