By Steve Knotek, Ph.D., Bucknell University
The scientist-practitioner model has been the conceptual cornerstone of professional school psychology over the past 40 years, since the Boulder (1949) and the Thayer conferences (1955), and there are solid reasons why this concept has endured (Lambert, 1993). School psychologists are called upon to assess, define and intervene in a wide variety of educational contexts, and with a broad cross section of students. The complexity of the job requires that school psychologists be “professionals” and not simply technicians. As professionals, school psychologists interpret and apply psychological knowledge, and psychological ways of knowing, to diagnose students’ educational functioning and then dispense psycho-educational prescriptions and interventions to ameliorate the students’ educational “illness.” Psychological science lies at the heart of practice (Bickman & Ellis, 1990).
Although in popular use, the term scientist is often used synonymously with academic research. It can be more broadly defined (Phillips, 1990) and can arguably be expanded to include school psychologists who engage in a constructive form of practice. Practitioners whose interventions are formulated by using psychological
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