The Developmental Contours of Character

Abstract

Historically, there has been a chasm between the fields of developmental psychology and education. While so much of educational practice is or should be based on theory about and research on child and adolescent development, sadly this is less common than one might presume. In a recent editorial for Edutopia, Chris Colin (2009) laments that "what is discovered in the lab tends either to stay in the lab or is basically irrelevant to the classroom." He then lays out the many reasons for this failure; the two disciplines tend to work in isolation from each other, psychological work is complex and often highly abstract or theoretical; there is a tendency to want to apply basic research before it is fully understood. Nonetheless, there are plenty of examples of cases where effective practice is attained by the timely and appropriate applicaton of child and adolescent psychological research. In other words, this is the path we ought to travel, even if there are many hurdles to overcome.