Educational Psychology: Active Learning Edition Plus MyLab Education with Pearson eText -- Access Card Package 14th Edition

Purchased book for school, full of great resources

The first sentence of this book's preface indicates it's intended for students enrolled in courses spanning such disciplines as teaching, psychology, counseling, therapy, and nursing. That seems to promise a deep dive into the psychological mechanisms underpinning the transmission, reception, and processing of new information (which we may broadly refer to as learning or education). Unfortunately, the book's contents don't quite live up to that lofty goal. Instead, the book is focused almost entirely on preparing teachers for the experiences they will encounter in the classroom setting in American public schools.If you're an American teacher in training (or, to a lesser extent, any teacher in training, though the book focuses heavily on the regulations governing public education in the United States), this might be an ideal book for you. If, on the other hand, you're interested, either personally or professionally, specifically in the psychology of education, you're likely to be disappointed.Absent are any deep discussions of such essential topics as neuroscience, intelligence testing, personality psychology, etc., all of which are mentioned only briefly and in passing between other topics of interest primarily to teachers (and of decidedly less interest to those of us who may be interested in education for psychological reasons but have no intention of ever taking the helm of a classroom). A final chapter (or "cluster," as they're called in this edition) concerning assessments, for instance, would have been a golden opportunity for the author to provide a rich introduction to the complex and fascinating field of psychometrics. Instead, the reader is treated to a guide concerning the fair and equitable construction of classroom tests. Worthy content? Perhaps, but not what one really expects from a book in which fully half of the title is "psychology."It may be reasonably argued that a single textbook can't possibly contain all of the information I request. A fair enough objection, and it's probably true. Entire libraries have been written on intelligence testing (a particular area of interest for myself). And perhaps it is unreasonable to expect an introductory text like this one to get very deep into cognitive neuroscience given the wide variety of backgrounds from which the book's readers might approach the subject (though I'm much more reluctant to accept that objection). But the fact of the matter is, though no single volume could offer a COMPLETE picture of these disciplines, it could and should have included MORE about them.Instead of building a robust (if necessarily incomplete) model of the psychology and neuroscience of education, the book wastes considerable space following political and sociological tangents related to questions of student equity in the public school systems. While these may be interesting subjects to discuss, and I'm sure every reader has some thoughts on the subjects, I would argue they're less productive than developing a deep understanding of how the brain processes information. Without a solid grasp of the psychology (which is, incidentally, what the book promises in the first place), there seems little point in even beginning to discuss the sociology, which is, to put it most charitably, at least less indisputably grounded in good science than the psychological principles.It's unfortunate that the book seems to have lost its focus because its author, herself a trained psychologist rather than a teacher, surely would have been able to offer richer insights into psychology, whereas the educational tips actually provided often didn't rise that far above common sense best practices.