Educational psychology, theoretical and research branch of modern psychology, concerned with the learning processes and psychological problems associated with the teaching and training of students. The educational psychologist studies the cognitive development of students and the various factors involved in learning, including aptitude and learning measurement, the creative process, and the motivational forces that influence dynamics between students and teachers. Educational psychology is a partly experimental and partly applied branch of psychology, concerned with the optimization of learning. It differs from school psychology, which is an applied field that deals largely with problems in elementary and secondary school systems.

Unquestioned Assumptions Underlying Psychology as a Foundation From early attempts to extrapolate laws of learning from laboratory studies of animal learning to the present writers of contemporary educational psychology textbooks who still harken back to some "rather obvious principles known since the beginning of this century," educational psychologists have framed the problem as one of transfer of learning from one situation to another, or from in school to out of school.6 Gagné introduced the concepts of vertical transfer and horizontal transfer--two concepts that have affected significantly the content and methods of teaching educational psychology for the past two decades. In his theory of vertical transfer, Gagné posited the idea that learning of lower level skills in a learning hierarchy facilitates the learning of higher level skills in the hierarchy because they serve as prerequisites for those higher level skills as follows: In vertical transfer, intellectual skills exhibit transfer to "higher-level" skills, that is, to skills which are more complex. . . . The intellectual skill of multiplying whole numbers, for example, is a part of the more complex skills of dividing, adding, and multiplying fractions, finding square roots, solving proportions, and many others. Transfer to the learning of these more complex skills is dependent primarily on the prior learning of the simpler skills. The more basic skills must be "mastered," in the sense that they can be readily retrieved, in order for transfer to take place to the learning of the more complex intellectual skills. This principle is illustrated by the learning hierarchy.

While Gagné's description of vertical transfer seems to pertain more to the learner's procedural knowledge, Bloom et. al's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives sets forth a similar hierarchical model 5 with the application of factual knowledge being dependent on prior learning of propositional knowledge and factual information.8 Thus, in an educational psychology course the prospective teacher might be taught the "definition of learning" prior to being taught the "principle of learning" on the assumption that the propositional knowledge--the definition--is necessary to learn the principle.