An example of a distal method in Educational Psychology is

Educational psychology has now acquired the status of a science and as such it follows the scientific method in obtaining answers to meaningful questions in the formal and informal educational settings. Quite recently various methods of the inquiry being followed by this discipline have been broadly put under the following two heads:

1. Distal Methods
2. Proximal Research Methods

1) Distal Method:

• The term distal methods have been used to indicate the strategies which are designed to approach an understanding of universally consistent or generalized laws applicable to contexts that are temporally, spatially, and environmentally remote or distal to the original context under study.
• These include those popularly accepted in methodological literature, such as observation, experimental, quasi-experimental, differential, and ex-post-facto methods of co-relational and criterion-group designs.

​2) Proximal Research Methods

• The term proximal methods are being increasingly used for the enquiry which does not assume or pretend to assume universal application.
• Its main value lies in the validity of its temporal generalizations, whereas environmental generalization is restricted to contexts identical or proximal in character to the context originally studied.
• Whereas distal research methods discover universal consistent laws or generalizations, the proximal research methods are in search of contextually consistent laws or generalizations.
• The various strategies of the proximal research are the introspection, the clinical methods, the evaluative enquiry, operations research (OR), simulation of problem solves performance and cybernetic monitoring.

​Hence, An example of a distal method in Educational Psychology is Ex post facto method.