What Can Educational Psychology Learn From, and Contribute to, Theory Development Scholarship?

One of the field of psychology’s stated goals is to produce scholarship with findings that benefit the world. Over the last 10 years, psychology scholarship and its presumed societal benefits have been called into question due to the field’s history of questionable research practices, racism, and epistemic oppression. Calls for methodological, ethical, and practical reforms are essential to building a psychological science that is just, effective, reliable, and beneficial. Recently, these calls have been complemented by a push to reform how theory is developed and used in psychology. There is great need for better understanding and implementation of theory development, both in the field of psychology broadly as well as in its subdisciplines, including educational psychology. At the same time, educational psychologists have much to contribute to the tripartite calls for methodological, ethical, and theory reforms. In this paper, I explore theory development in psychology by discussing the importance of developing both the descriptive and explanatory aspects of theory as well as the need to refine how theory is evaluated and integrated. Then, I review how innovations and practices in educational psychology can inform the broader theory reform movement in psychology writ large. Finally, I identify important future directions for further advancing theory reform in psychology, including addressing ableism in the field, increasing the field’s hospitability for theory revision, furthering theory development transparency, and more deeply integrating theory development into preparation programs.