Chapter 1: The Cognitive Revolution in Educational Psychology

This chapter serves as a foreword to the remaining chapters in the book. The chapter provides a description of the cognitive revolution, which began in the 1950s and reached full fruition in the late 1960s. The term “cognitive revolution” began to be used to take advantage of an analysis of scientific revolutions in general that was developed by Thomas Kuhn. The next section of the chapter describes how some aspects of the cognitive revolution seem to fit Kuhn’s analytic framework, and others do not. Following this analysis, the chapter turns to examining the impact of the cognitive revolution in educational psychology as illustrated by the remaining chapters in the book. Each of the chapters is briefly described and the end of the chapter comments on the likely direction the revolution will take in the future.