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In the preceding chapters, different angles were taken to illuminate the current appeal of psychology in education and educational research today. The different contributions of this book have spanned a wide range of psychological paradigms and subdisciplines, going from behaviourism and psychoanalysis over psychometrics, developmental psychology and educational psychology to present-day neurobiology. As a result, the attractions that have been identified are equally varied. While the extensiveness of the analysis that is offered provides a very rich picture, it is also prone to generate some conceptual confusion, which makes the jump to general, overarching conclusions particularly tricky. Nevertheless, it is possible to discern some broad lines and to identify some recurrent critiques which accompanied the examined attractions of psychology. In this chapter, Marc Depaepe¹sets the scene under four headings:These headlines can be read as critiques on the features of certain psychological methodologies as they are exerted within the field of educational research, but they might equally be read as warnings for our evaluation of the attractions psychology seems to offer. As a general observation, psychology appears throughout the volume as a very adaptable social science, which seems to succeed particularly well to transform itself to its "host discipline"—one could say in this regard that psychology superimposes upon the "philosophy" of disciplines it attaches itself to. Each of these metamorphoses, however, carries its own properties and troubles, some of which are present throughout the psychological discipline and others which are especially prominent in specific subdisciplines.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-007-5038-8_12

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