PSYCH 694 Week 5 Educational and Health Psychology Example

A Homework Club and a Diabetes Clinic: Educational and Health Psychology at Work in One Community Health Center

[Student Name]

University of Phoenix

PSYCH/694: Specialty Areas in Applied Psychology

Week 5 Assignment

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The health center, its programs, patients and figures are composites written for a model paper; research findings come from the sources listed.

Two programs at our health center show how psychology reaches beyond therapy. One helps children learn; the other helps adults live with chronic illness. This paper examines educational and health psychology through both.

Educational Psychology

Educational psychology studies how people learn and how teaching, motivation, development and assessment shape learning. Educational psychologists usually work in universities, research organizations and curriculum development, while school psychologists, a related specialty, work directly with students in schools. The specialty's research has practical implications for anyone who teaches, including volunteers.

The Homework Club

Our center runs an after-school homework club for about thirty children in grades three through eight, many from families where parents work evenings. Volunteers, mostly college students, help with homework and test preparation. When I watched sessions, children mostly reread textbook pages, highlighted and copied notes.

What Research Says About Study Techniques

Dunlosky et al. (2013) evaluated ten learning techniques against evidence from many studies, judging each by how well it generalizes across learners, materials, tasks and settings. Two techniques earned high utility ratings: practice testing, in which learners retrieve information through quizzes or flashcards, and distributed practice, in which study is spread out over time rather than crammed. Several others, including elaborative interrogation, self-explanation and interleaving different types of problems, received moderate ratings. Five popular habits, including summarizing, highlighting, rereading, keyword mnemonics and forming mental images of text, were rated low, since their benefits were small or unreliable.

Changing the Club

The findings suggest the club's favorite activities, rereading and highlighting, sit near the bottom of the list. With the club coordinator, I proposed three changes. Volunteers now end each session with a five-minute quiz on the day's material, using flashcards children make themselves. Spelling words and math facts are reviewed again two days and a week later, a simple spacing schedule. Children explain to a volunteer why an answer is correct, a form of self-explanation. We will compare weekly quiz scores before and after the change and ask teachers whether test grades improve.

The children were working hard at the techniques least likely to help them, which is a teaching problem, not a motivation problem.

Health Psychology

Health psychology looks at the ways mood, behavior and social conditions push health up or down, and it uses those findings in prevention, treatment and the design of care. Health psychologists work in hospitals, primary care, public health and research, and many are clinical psychologists with health specialization.

Leonard

Leonard, fifty-two, has had type 2 diabetes for eight years. His A1C, a measure of average blood sugar, is above ten percent, well above the target of seven. He misses medication doses, rarely checks his blood sugar and has stopped attending nutrition classes. His physician has repeatedly told him the risks.

A Biopsychosocial View

Engel (1977) argued that the dominant biomedical model of disease, which reduces illness to biological abnormalities and separates mind from body, leaves no room for the psychological, social and behavioral dimensions of illness. He proposed a biopsychosocial alternative that treats illness as a matter of several linked levels at once, running from cells through the person to families and communities. Engel used diabetes as an example: two patients with the same biochemical findings may experience and manage their illness very differently depending on their lives and circumstances.

Applied to Leonard, the biological factor is insulin resistance. Psychological factors include discouragement after years of failure and mild depression. Social factors include rotating shifts at a sawmill that disrupt meals and medication timing, a ninety-minute drive to the clinic and a family who cooks traditional foods high in refined flour. Telling Leonard the risks again addresses none of these.

Self-Efficacy

Bandura (2004) described health promotion from a social cognitive perspective. In his account, behavior rests on a handful of determinants: knowing what helps and harms health, confidence in one's own ability, expected payoffs, the goals people set and what they see as helping or blocking them. Self-efficacy, the belief that one can exercise control over one's health habits, was central, because it influences goals, effort and persistence after setbacks. Bandura argued that self-management programs should build self-efficacy through mastery experiences, starting with achievable steps.

Leonard's self-efficacy is low; he says, "I've tried, and it never works." Our psychologist now meets him during medical visits for brief sessions focused on one small goal at a time: first, taking his morning medication with coffee every day, tracked on a card. After two weeks of success, the next goal adds an evening dose timed to his shift. Each success is noticed and recorded, and setbacks are treated as information about what to adjust rather than as proof that he cannot change.

Early Results in the Homework Club

After six weeks, the changes showed promise. Average scores on the end-of-session quizzes rose from about half correct in the first week to nearly three quarters by the sixth, and two teachers reported that students from the club did better on spelling tests. Volunteers were initially skeptical; quizzing felt less helpful than rereading, and children complained that it was harder. That reaction matches the research, which notes that effective techniques often feel more difficult in the moment, and explaining that point to volunteers helped them persist.

Why Leonard Stopped Coming to Classes

When our psychologist asked Leonard why he stopped attending nutrition classes, his answer had nothing to do with motivation. The classes met on Tuesday afternoons, when he works, and the handouts recommended foods his family does not buy and he does not like. The class taught knowledge he already had, the first of Bandura's determinants, while ignoring the barriers and the low confidence that actually stood in his way. The center is now piloting evening classes built around local foods and family cooking.

Including the Family

Leonard's wife does most of the cooking, and she had never been invited to a visit. The psychologist asked whether she would like to come, and at the next appointment the three of them discussed small changes, such as smaller portions of fry bread and adding vegetables to stews, that the whole family could accept. Leonard told the psychologist later that, for once, diabetes felt like something his family was handling together rather than his personal failure.

Measures

For Leonard, the center will track A1C every three months, medication refill records and his self-efficacy ratings on a brief questionnaire. For the clinic overall, the share of patients with A1C below eight percent will show whether the approach helps more broadly.

Where the Specialties Overlap

Both specialties rely on learning: children learning content, adults learning new health habits. Both use research on motivation and practice, and both often work through others, volunteers and teachers in one case, physicians and nurses in the other.

Conclusion

Educational psychology changed how our homework club studies, replacing rereading with quizzing and spacing. Health psychology changed how our clinic sees Leonard, from a noncompliant patient to a person whose biology, psychology and circumstances interact, and whose confidence can be built step by step.

References

Bandura, A. (2004). Health promotion by social cognitive means. Health Education & Behavior, 31(2), 143-164. https://doi.org/10.1177/1090198104263660

Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J., & Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving students' learning with effective learning techniques: Promising directions from cognitive and educational psychology. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4-58. https://doi.org/10.1177/1529100612453266

Engel, G. L. (1977). The need for a new medical model: A challenge for biomedicine. Science, 196(4286), 129-136. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.847460