The first volume, Human Nature, mainly discusses the problems related to human innate tendency, including its composition, function, physiological and anatomical characteristics, and the order and period of its appearance and disappearance. Thorndike's basic view is that man is the product of innate tendency, acquired environment and education. He believes that the duty of educational psychology is to find out: what is human nature? What is the law of human nature change? The purpose of education is to make some innate tendencies last forever, eliminate some, correct or change the direction of others. The first principle of education is "to take personal nature as a way to improve it, so that individuals can produce the knowledge, habits, influences, interests and ideals they need."
The second volume, Learning Psychology, discusses the laws of learning psychology, which is the core part of his educational psychology. He divided learning into four categories: the formation of connections that ordinary animals can obtain, the formation of connections including concepts, discriminating learning and selective thinking or reasoning learning. He discussed the process and conditions of learning beauty. He emphasized the learning view of connectionism and thought that learning is to form connections. "Teaching is to arrange certain situations that will lead to the required connections and make them satisfactory."
According to the results of animal learning experiments, Thorndike put forward many learning rules, including effect rules, practice rules and preparation rules, and emphasized that although human learning is more complicated than animal learning, the simple rules revealed by animal learning are also the basic principles of human learning, which can be used to guide and improve teaching.
The third volume, Individual Differences and Their Causes, mainly discusses the innate causes of individual differences, such as gender differences, family inheritance, maturity and other issues. In addition, the influence of environmental education on individual differences is also discussed, and it is considered that both environment and heredity are very important.
Therefore, when doing education, we must follow the psychological law of students' growth, consider individual differences, master the teaching materials and analyze the learning situation, design a reasonable teaching process, add multiple elements and carry out diversified teaching methods.