The purpose of the symposium was to clarify how the study of classrom teaching could contribute not only to solve the problems in the classroom but also to explore the fundamental principles of educational psychology, through discussions about the interaction between the experimental educational psychology and the study of classroom teaching.
Four speakers, two discussants and many members praticipated the discussion.
The main topics discussed were as follows:
(1)Conceptions of the study of classroom teaching,
(2)Roles of educational psychologists in the study of classroom teaching, and
(3)Storage and use of research products.
On the first topic, one viewpoint was that it was useless to explore general rules in the classroom teaching. An important thing was not the formal characteristics but the real phenomena of the classroom teaching. The classroom teaching was to examine facts one by one as a science of experience in order to use the resuts obtained in the classroom. It was also of no use to explore the objective rules of classroom teaching without comprehention of the specific relationship between teachers and pupils who have long interaction in the same classroom. According to another viewpoint, it was less useful to gather facts one by one in the classroom teaching, but it was quite useful to do scientific study of classroom teaching in order to construct the general theory of teaching beyond facts and to solve various kinds of problems in the classroom teaching.
As to the second topic, i. e., the roles of educational psychologisis, two different opinions were shown. One was to emphasize the direct contributions to classroom teaching and the other was to emphasize the proposal of general suggestions for optimizing combinations of contents and methods in teaching and for considering group dynamics of pupils in the classroom.
On the third topic, it was recommended by many participants to publish a “Handbook of classroom teaching”. The Handbook should include lists of informations about sets of objectives, contents, methods, teaching strategies, teaching tactics, teachers' individualities, pupils' characteristics, actual teaching learning behaviors and acquired effects on pupils' learning.
