Throughout 2023 and 2024, we served as co-guest editors of a topical collection in Educational Psychology Review on The Past, Present, and Future of Theory Development in Educational Psychology. In this topical collection, authors of prominent theories in the field were invited to reflect upon how they generated, developed, and iterated their ideas, as well as what the future might hold for their theories. Our hope was these articles could serve as examples of how theory building happens, normalizations of the often difficult and circuitous paths theories can take from initial observations to formalizations, and inspirations to others to begin their own theory development journey. In this reflection on the topical collection, we present themes that emerged as we curated the articles, including themes we anticipated (e.g., the many different ways theories can be generated) as well as ones we did not (e.g., the mix of boldness and intellectual humility theory generation requires). Also, we examine the epistemic virtues our authors used to evaluate their theories, such as practicality, as well as the virtues that were less commonly mentioned, such as internal consistency. Finally, we identify future directions for theory development in educational psychology, including the need to improve the climate for theory development in the field, particularly in terms of creating structures that incentivize and reward natural history work.

在整个 2023 年和 2024 年，我们担任了 Educational Psychology Review 关于教育心理学理论发展的过去、现在和未来的专题合集的联合客座编辑。在这个主题集合中，该领域著名理论的作者被邀请反思他们如何产生、发展和迭代他们的想法，以及他们的理论的未来可能是什么。我们希望这些文章可以作为理论构建如何发生的例子，将理论从最初的观察到形式化通常困难和迂回的道路正常化，并激励其他人开始自己的理论发展之旅。在对主题集合的反思中，我们展示了在策划文章时出现的主题，包括我们预期的主题（例如，理论产生的多种不同方式）以及我们没有预期的主题（例如，大胆和智力谦逊理论的产生需要的混合）。此外，我们还研究了作者用来评估他们的理论的认识美德，例如实用性，以及不太常被提及的美德，例如内部一致性。最后，我们确定了教育心理学理论发展的未来方向，包括需要改善该领域理论发展的环境，特别是在创建激励和奖励自然历史工作的结构方面。