Unorthodox thoughts on the nature and mission of contemporary educational psychology

Two commonly held assumptions are questioned-that mental states and processes are to be studied in isolation, and that individuals' psychology can be studied out of social and cultural context. The view presented here is that of an educational psychology focusing on the study and design of complex and contextualized composites, making it analogous to architecture and aerospace science, fields that deal with composites and whose units of analysis reflect rather than reduce the complexity of the phenomena they study and design. Design and study of learning environments are argued to serve as the apex of the field's scholarly activities. Guttman's Small Space Analysis is offered as a useful tool for such activities.