The development of western educational psychology has roughly experienced the following four periods. (a) in the initial stage of the history of psychology (before the 1920s), from the establishment of the world's first psychology laboratory in Feng Te (W. Feng Te) 1879 to the end of 19, the research center of psychology has been in Europe. Until the turn of the19th century, the United States gradually became the center of psychological research and the birthplace of educational psychology due to the functionalist movement in the field of psychology. Among them are Feng Te (1832- 1920), James (1842- 1965438) and Dewey (John Dewey, 1859- 1952). 1874- 1949), and Thorndike made outstanding contributions. From 1896, Thorndike conducted a series of experimental studies on animal psychology, and then conducted a lot of research on human learning. He is determined to study and solve problems related to learning with accurate, precise and quantitative methods. He summed up the research results of American functionalism and the exploration of educational psychology in the past 20 years. Based on his own experimental research on learning, he published "Educational Psychology" in 1903, which is the first monograph named after educational psychology in the west. It is recognized by western psychologists that this year is the time when educational psychology was formally born as an independent discipline. 1913-1914 years, Thorndike developed his theory into a three-volume Outline of Educational Psychology, and Thorndike established his own educational psychology system from the perspective that man is a creature. His educational psychology is divided into three parts: the first part talks about human nature, its composition and learning ability; The second part talks about learning psychology and discusses the learning laws of animals and people, which is the core of his educational psychology theory; The third part talks about individual differences and their causes. This book laid the foundation for the development of educational psychology, and the name and system of western educational psychology were also established. In the next 30 years, almost all similar works in the United States inherited this system. However, most of the works in this period are based on the principles of general psychology to explain the actual educational problems, mainly some materials about learning theory. (2) The development period (from the 1920s to the end of 1950s) is characterized by extensive absorption of education-related contents from various branches of psychology, and the research scope is constantly expanding. For example, it absorbed the results of children's psychology and psychological tests and greatly expanded its own content. Since the 1920s, many important achievements have been made in the study of animals and people, and various schools have been formed, including not only Thorndike's connection theory, Skinner's operational behaviorism learning theory and reinforcement theory, but also Gestalt Epiphany learning theory and the cognitive construction and development of tolman (E.C.Tolman, 1886- 1959) and Piaget. The disputes between these theories and schools have promoted the development of educational psychology methods. After 1930s, subject psychology developed rapidly and became an integral part of educational psychology. In the 1940s, sigmund freud's thoughts (1856- 1939) spread widely, and the problems about children's personality, social adaptation and physical health also entered the field of educational psychology. In 1950s, programmed teaching and teaching machines appeared, and the idea of information theory was accepted by many psychologists. These achievements have also influenced and changed the content of educational psychology. During this period, there were hundreds of educational psychology textbooks and anthologies published in the United States, but due to the lack of unified theoretical guidance, there were various versions and systems, and most of the contents were taken from general psychology and children's psychology. Influenced by behaviorism, only learning is common to all books. It can be said that educational psychology at this time has not yet become a subject with an independent theoretical system. 3) Maturity (1960s to the end of 1970s) Since 1960s, there have been some new changes and trends in the content and system of western educational psychology. The concentrated performance is as follows: First, the content is increasingly concentrated, mostly around effective teaching and learning. Although different textbooks focus on how to teach or learn, there are several aspects of research that are recognized by most people, such as the relationship between education and psychological development, learning psychology, teaching psychology, evaluation and measurement, individual differences, classroom management and teacher psychology. Educational psychology is forming a discipline with an independent theoretical system. At the same time, the differences between theoretical schools are narrowing day by day, absorbing reasonable content from each other, and the boundaries of schools tend to be blurred. Second, pay more attention to the combination of educational practice and serving school education. Especially in the early 1960s, the curriculum reform movement initiated by J.S. Bruner (19 15-) pushed this enthusiasm to a climax. The researchers turned to analyze the practice of school education and put forward different teaching models. Since then, western educational psychology has gradually attached importance to the discussion of educational process and students' psychology, and to the improvement of teaching materials, teaching methods and teaching means. Humanism also set off an educational reform movement. At the same time, the social and psychological factors in teaching have also aroused people's research interest. Many educational psychologists begin to regard schools and classrooms as social scenes and pay attention to the social and psychological factors that affect teaching. If someone studies learning motivation with social psychology theory. Others attach importance to social and psychological problems in teaching organization, such as the size of classes and the role of students. With the development of information science and technology, especially computers, the research of computer-aided instruction (CAI) in American educational psychology is also in the ascendant, and people have done a lot of research on the teaching effect and conditions of CAI. (IV) Perfection period (after the Eastern Jin Dynasty in the 1980s) After the 1980s, the system of educational psychology became more and more perfect, with more and more contents. With the widespread introduction of Piaget and Vygotsky's theories into the United States and the profound influence of cognitive psychology research, people's understanding of the concept of learning has changed greatly, and the research on the process and conditions of learning and teaching has become more and more in-depth, such as studying the problem-solving process, learning strategies and learning motivation from the cognitive level. In addition, educational psychology research pays more and more attention to serving teaching practice, and has developed many effective teaching models, such as cooperative learning. Bruner made a special report at the invitation of the American Association for Educational Research from 65438 to 0994, which summarized the achievements of educational psychology in the past ten years, mainly in the following four aspects: First, he actively studied how to make students actively participate in the process of teaching and learning and control their psychological activities more; The second is reflective research, which studies how to make students understand the meaning of what they have learned from the inside and adjust their learning; Third, cooperative research on how to make students share the human resources involved in the teaching and learning process, and how to organize students to study together under certain background, such as peer counseling, cooperative learning, interactive learning and so on. Let students combine personal scientific thinking with peer cooperation; Fourth, social and cultural research, which studies how the social and cultural background affects the learning process and results. In addition, with the rapid development of information technology in the late 1980s, the application research of information technology in education has reached a new level. This paper discusses the characteristics of students' learning process under the multimedia network environment, and how to create a good learning environment for students, so as to promote them to acquire knowledge and cultivate their learning ability. These studies have brought fresh blood to the development of learning and teaching theory.