International Journal of Technology and Design Education 8: 9296, 1998.

ment perspective seems to be under-represented. This could be the result

of taking literacy strictly in the sense of being able to live in a technological
world as a citizen rather than an employee. On the other hand, employa-
bility nowadays is increasingly seen as a crucial part of our citizenship.
But, as always, it is easier to list what more could have been included in
a book like this than to get together those aspects that have been included.
Therefore, I would like to end by expressing my appreciation for what
has been accomplished here and stating a strong recommendation to those
who are involved in and/or interested in the concepts of scientific and
technological literacy to read this book and profit from the information
and perspectives that one finds here so nicely brought together. Both Jenkins
and Layton, and of course UNESCO, should be congratulated on this
volume.

University of Technology MARC DE VRIES

Eindhoven
The Netherlands

De Corte, E. & Weinert, F. E. (eds.). International Encyclopedia of

Development and Instructional Psychology. Elsevier Science Ltd., Oxford,
1996. ISBN 0 08 042980 7 (Hardback: US $219.75).

As its preface tells us, this work is an updated and expanded spinoff
volume from the twelve-volume second edition of the International
Encyclopedia of Education published in 1994 under the editorship of Torsten
Husn and T. Neville Postlethwaite. The new tome comes from a combi-
nation of the entries published in the IEE sections on developmental
psychology and instructional psychology: each contributor has updated
his contribution and in addition about ten new articles were commissioned.
Thus as well as the editors introduction, the volume contains 173 entries
by a total of 195 authors, arranged in 17 sections, a list of contributors,
plus separate name and subject indices.
The idea for this combination of sections came, De Corte and Weinert
tell us, from the integrative trend that has seen a blurring of the frontiers
between developmental and instructional/educational psychology, which
started the century with quite distinct orientations and approaches, but which
have come together particularly strongly in the last few decades. Doubtless
the publishers also saw commercial potential in such a venture, but for
consumers this is also a welcome enterprise in that we have here a much
more affordable and very useful resource that is focused, up to date and
authoritative. Any institution concerned with education or training will
find it most useful to have this item amongst its reference materials.
Its up to date authoritativeness is apparent in the very high quality of
the entries generally and the pre-eminence of a good proportion of its con-
tributors. These come overwhelmingly from North America on the one hand
 BOOK REVIEWS 93

and Northern Europe on the other, especially if not surprisingly the Benelux
countries and Germany; Britons and Antipodeans, on the other hand, are
somewhat conspicuous by their absence. The references and further reading
typically include very recent items and whilst the topics range considerably,
current psycho-pedagogical themes are very much in evidence, including
the nature and implications of skilled expertise, neo-Vygotskyan and situated
cognition/cognitive apprenticeship emphases on both social and construc-
tive dimensions of knowledge and its development, and the need for
attention to the interaction of influences, such as cognitive, affective and
conative factors, in the promotion of learning.
The form and organisational structure of the sections and their several
entries also give the book very useful potential for direct but also critical
access to this modern range of pedagogical resources, even for the relatively
uninitiated user. Thus, in traditional encyclopedic style, entries average
around six twin-columned pages in length and tend on the whole to be
densely referenced, sometimes with further reading suggestions, although
there are some that stand out for a more prosey account with less refer-
encing to threaten their fluency. Thus entries can generally be accessed
relatively speedily as a first base from which to explore in more depth.
Not only this, but two further features also assist the user to grasp and
appraise the material in a critical way. A first is the provision of various
introductions and overviews, notably those in the books first section,
covering a general framework of human development, learning, and instruc-
tion in educational perspective. These generally give well crafted plans
of the forest whilst other entries fill out the picture of particular copses
and trees. A second feature is the overlapping nature not only of the entries,
but also, to some extent, of sections. Thus, for instance, Section VIII is titled
Theories and Models of Learning in Educational Settings and contains
an entry on Cooperative Learning by Robert Slavin, whilst Section XIII
on Classroom Learning Environments offers an entry on Group Processes
in the Classroom by Neville Bennett. Now it will be recognised that the
interrelated and interactive nature of learning, development and instructional
processes is such that even in principle classification and sequencing would
pose severe difficulties in a collection like this. And it is likely that this
overlappingness feature will be found frustrating by anyone approaching
this tome with an overly concrete-minded approach that ignores such messy
complexities and expects neat answers in segmented treatments. Au con-
traire, however, the overlaps and similarities of entry and section titles ought
in practice to attract the user with a particular topic in mind to consult a
number of entries. And this should in turn make it likely that he or she
will become aware of the range of ideas and findings of potential relevance,
their strengths and weaknesses, and the dangers of exclusive focus on any
particular bandwagon.
It will be clear, then, that I believe this carefully compiled work offers
immense utility both as an up-to-date reference work for anyone already
working in the field of pedagogy and as an introductory resource for those
94 BOOK REVIEWS

coming into it. Even as a general resource, however, I do have a couple

of slight reservations and when one goes on to focus on its potential con-
tribution to the more specific interests likely to characterise readers of
this journal, particular limitations are revealed, some of which may turn
out to have more general relevance. These aspects also raise some inter-
esting issues concerning pedagogical ideas and their intelligent utilisation.
As regards this works status as a general resource, the breadth of
coverage is considerable and its currency virtually state of the art, as I
have indicated and one could expect. But there is perhaps one major recent
psychological theme that appears to receive less attention than it might, that
of connectionism or parallel distributed processing. Whilst this might be
justified on the basis that such work does not yet seem to have achieved
distinctive applications at the educational level, there are leaders both in the
developmental field (e.g. Simon & Halford, 1995) and in instructional
psychology (e.g. Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1996) who are increasingly
stressing the important implications of neural network perspectives.
The modern recognition that any educational enterprise involves inter-
action of many elements and factors means that there must be a great deal
in a book dealing with psychological processes that will be relevant to
specific content focuses such as technology and design education, partic-
ularly when, as here, that book itself emphasises such interactions. Thus the
major themes referred to earlier are all of clear importance to this field,
as are others such as self-regulation in action and learning, issues of trans-
lating psychology into educational design and, perhaps most specifically,
the nature and teaching of problem-solving capabilities. So there is also
an immense resource here for the tech. ed. community.
But a tome whose entries recognise the traditional difficulty of transfer
and the current emphasis on situational specificity of human learning ten-
dencies is itself laying seeds of some discontent in this domain when its
section on curriculum and the psychology of learning and instruction
(Section X) contains no entry specifically dedicated to technology and/or
design education. There are pieces on the traditionally associated fields
of science and of visual arts, but technology/design education is hardly to
be reduced to these and in any case, even where they might have, the science
and visual arts education entries do not offer much of a bridge towards
the specific concerns and processes of technology/design education. A
very useful resource for ideas about many universal aspects of learning-
teaching processes, then, but one in which the specific design and
technology applications and implications will have to be developed by the
users themselves.
This brings me to a more general point about the relating of psychology
to education, in particular the relating of psycho-pedagogical insights to
teaching strategies and practices. It is one of the positive features of this
encyclopedia that its entries variously indicate how far we have come in
differentiating and articulating the various possibilities and issues involved
in illuminating practice. It is now clearly recognised, as just mentioned,
 BOOK REVIEWS 95

that it is inadequate to rely on seeking general insights for local applica-

tion, and that specific educational contexts must also be studied directly.
As Shulman has pointed out, teaching knowledge needs to extend into
subject pedagogy. Likewise the design of learning/teaching processes
requires one not just to consider ideas about learning, but to consider their
relationship to teaching strategies and in doing so to take into account a
whole range of interacting aspects across the former divides of cognitive,
conative and affective categories, not to mention the social nature of
teaching interactions.
What is perhaps rather less in evidence in at least some entries, however,
is the sort of critical meta-consideration or philosophy of applied under-
standing that is surely required for intelligent deployment of formal insights
and research findings of the sorts offered in the book.
One aspect of this might be expressed by saying that in seeking the
illumination of teaching, ones hopes can be strong, but ones expecta-
tions should be measured. The critical-deconstructive theme of current
post-modernism may perhaps be overly negative regarding the powers of
systematic human understanding, but as George Kelly (1995) pointed out
in mid-century, any theoretical construal has its limited focus and range
of convenience. It attempts to illuminate a limited focus and may be thought
to extend to a wider domain, but not without limits. How much of a reality
domain it does succeed in validly illuminating is another matter, but it is
at least as likely to be equally limited. Putting much the same point in
different terms, human thinking cannot avoid some degree of reductionism,
but the more complex and ambitious ones subject-matter, the one more
should be aware that ones philosophy may ignore some things in heaven
and earth.
It has long seemed to me that given the multi-level, interactive nature
of their human domain, educationists need to take this point on board par-
ticularly keenly and be wary of allowing any set of formal theoretical
constructs to act as the exclusive filter for their access to reality. This
applies, incidentally, not just to such traditional candidates for reductionist
demonology as radical behaviourism, but also, for example, to approaches
that focus just on a particular aspect of pedagogical process, e.g. consciously
processed sense-making, or make such limiting, often implicit assump-
tions as that there is only one path or a universally best one in relation to
any area of learning or development. In other words, the effective deploy-
ment of pedagogical insight demands a philosophical-critical aspect, which
educationists have perhaps sometimes forgotten at the cost of sterile debates
and ineffective impact. It is perhaps unfair to expect an encyclopedia of
developmental and instructional psychology to go much into philosophy,
but I nevertheless came across just a few entries in this one where absence
of the sort of conceptual sharpness and criticality Ive just been enjoining
reminded me somewhat uncomfortably of Wittgensteins jibe about psy-
chologists and confusion. I should nevertheless immediately make very clear
that in the vast proportion of cases, the integrative-eclectic features I singled
International Journal of Technology and Design Education 8: 9698, 1998.

out earlier make this encyclopedia an exceedingly worthwhile resource

for gaining up to date, critically-grounded insights. Ironically, the apparent
irrelevance, for a variety of reasons (cf. Tomlinson, 1992) of educational
psychological content in the past may have contributed to a lessening of
the role of psychology and psychologists in education and teacher training
in some countries, such as the UK. But this encyclopedia makes very clear
what useful resources developmental and instructional psychology now have
to offer, as well as providing an excellent means of access to them.

REFERENCES

Bereiter, C. & Scardamalia, M.: 1996, Rethinking Learning, in D. R. Olson & N. Torrance
(eds.), The Handbook of Education and Human Development, Blackwell, Oxford.
Kelly, G. A.: 1955, The Psychology of Personal Constructs. 2 Vols. Norton, New York.
Simon, T. J. & Halford, G. S.: 1995, Developing Cognitive Competence: New Approaches
to Process Modeling, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, N.J.
Tomlinson, P. D.: 1992, Psychology and Education: What Went Wrong Or Did It?, The
Psychologist: Bulletin of the British Psychological Society 5, 105109.

School of Education PETER TOMLINSON

University of Leeds

Janet Burns (ed.), Technology in the New Zealand Curriculum Perspectives

on Practice, Dunmore Press, 1997, pp. 280, ISBN 0 86469 280 3, NZ$
37.50.

The editor of this volume and her twelve contributors are all based in
institutions of higher education in New Zealand. They include some
who served as members of technology curriculum working parties and
writing teams for the implementation of the 1993 New Zealand Curriculum
Framework. Others have extensive experience of teaching technological
subjects at tertiary level. Their collective aim is to provide a resource for
New Zealand teachers faced with the task of introducing what for many
in primary and secondary schools amounts to a new subject.
It might be thought that this specific antipodean context and role of the
book would place considerable limits on its value to those from elsewhere
in the world. Any such concerns would be largely misplaced, however. There
is much in the volume to interest anyone engaged in the challenging task
of establishing technology as a central component in the education of all
children. At the very least, it is always intriguing to have a sight of how
others are tackling matters. But what they count as problems and why,
and how they formulate and attack these problems, has intellectual currency
at many levels beyond casual curiosity.
The book is structured in two distinct, though complementary, parts. In
the first (six chapters), some general issues are identified and explored.