Doctoral Dissertations

Date of Award

12-1999

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

Education

Major Professor

Robert Williams

Committee Members

Charles Thompson, Melissa Groves, John Peters

Abstract

Students and professionals in both education and psychology need current information about doctoral training in educational psychology, because such closely related programs as school psychology, developmental psychology, and counseling psychology are competing with educational psychology for doctoral students and other resources. Moreover, because students and professionals are increasingly using the internet as their source of current information, the primary source of information used in this study was internet web sites for doctoral programs in educational psychology.

This dissertation provides programmatic data on the current doctoral programs in educational psychology, including demographic features (e.g., number of programs, most popular degrees, degree titles, length of programs, location of programs, job market for graduates) and conceptual features (e.g., content areas, conceptual models, primary goals, degree of structure, level of scholarship, and innovative features of programs). Next, the dissertation provides a ranking of top programs in the field of educational psychology based on size of faculty, level of faculty scholarship, and innovativeness of the respective programs. Finally, exemplary program web sites were evaluated and ranked. Finally, this study was framed around the millennium, with purposes of being reflective about the history of educational psychology and predictive about future trends in graduate study in this area.

This study found that a majority of educational psychology programs have web sites and are using the internet as a way of disseminating programmatic information. With respect to the demographic features of programs, the most popular degree offered was the Ph.D., and the most common location of educational psychology doctoral programs was colleges of education rather than departments of psychology. The average length of a doctoral program was 60 credit hours from a masters degree and 85 credit hours from the bachelors degree. The most popular program titles and content areas were learning, cognition, and development.

The conceptual models of scholarly, practical, and scientist-practitioner were used in categorizing the goals, curricula, and job markets of the programs. The experimenter found that while a majority of programs described goals and curricula that reflected a scholarly emphasis, job markets had a scientist-practitioner emphasis. The structure of educational psychology doctoral programs, as represented in the web sites, generally provided an overview of requirements, but did not describe specific sequences of coursework or model programs to students. Also in regards to structure, the majority of programs described a process in which students and faculty together determined program objectives with some degree of flexibility in coursework.

Innovative features were also analyzed across programs, showing that programs often described job opportunities that differed from university teaching and research and had content areas that differed from general areas of educational psychology. Programs were less likely to have such innovative features as program application (e.g., internship, practica, or other research to practice opportunities), instructional delivery systems, and innovative systems of research.

Journal publications range for educational psychology faculty from .8 to 7.7, with the mean being 2.82 journal publications per faculty member from 1994-June 1999. Faculties' publication citation ranges were 0 to 27, with the mean being 7.19 journal publications per faculty member from 1994-June 1999. A citation analysis revealed that educational psychologists are diverse in their publication sources and that core educational psychology journals account for less than ten percent of the total publications by educational psychologists. Also, core joumals of educational psychology were identified via publication frequencies among all identified educational psychology faculties.

Programs were identified as exemplary educational psychology doctoral programs based on size of faculty, scholarly productivity, innovativeness, and composite ratings of doctoral programs. These rankings were then compared to prior rankings of prestigious educational psychology programs. The University of California at Los Angeles was rated as the most exemplary educational psychology doctoral program among the top ten universities identified. In addition, doctoral program web sites were evaluated on-line, and a top-ten list of exemplary web sites was generated. The rankings of web sites identified Brigham Young University and Indiana University as the most exemplary web sites in educational psychology. Top ten programs having exemplary web sites differed considerably from the top-ten exemplary programs based on faculty size, scholarly productivity, and innovativeness.

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