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500 BCE
Democritus
Democritus (460-370 B.C.), one of the most celebrated philosophers of antiquity, wrote on the advantages conferred by schooling and the influence of the home on learning. -
300 BCE
Plato and Aristotle
Plato (428-347 BC) believed that all knowledge is innate at birth and perfect for experimental learning during growth. Aristotle (384-322 BC) was the first to observe that the "association" between ideas facilitated understanding and memory. Both discussed educational psychology: the different types of education; psychomotor skills; the arts and morals in the development of individuals; teacher-student relationships; the means and methods of teaching. -
88 BCE
Quintilian
During Roman times, Quintiliano (35-100 A.D.) argued in favor of public education instead of private education. He condemned physical strength as a method of discipline, he believed that good teaching and an attractive curriculum could solve behavioral problems. He urged teachers to study and take into account the unique characteristics of their students and established criteria for teacher selection. In his book "The Oratory" we can observe functional educational psychology. -
1520
Juan Luis Vives
Juan Luis Vives (1492-1540), urged teachers and governments to present what should be learned. I point out that this knowledge must be practiced. He wrote about practical knowledge and learning dependent on self-activity. I argue that instruction should be tailored to individual student differences and interests. He was a forerunner of contemporary research on metacognition and the need for students to be evaluated based on their own past achievements and not compared to other students. -
Comenius
Comenius (1592-1671), influenced educational and psycho-educational thinking with a humanistic writing at the beginning of the modern era. He wrote texts that were based on his developmental theory, focused on the use of visual aids during instruction. He recommended that instruction begin with the general and then move on to the particular. He taught that understanding, not memory, is the goal of instruction. Research in media and instruction originates from Comenius' textbook design. -
Johann Friedrich Herbart
Johann Friedrich Herbart (17761841). He wrote about schema theory, advocating for cognitive psychology. Herbartians promoted teaching through a logical progression of learning, a revolutionary idea in the late 19th century. They also made pedagogical technique the focus of scientific study and promoted the five steps to teach any subject: (a) preparation (of the student's mind), (b) presentation (of the material to be learned), (c) comparison, (d) generalization and (e) request. -
Science and Education
Experimental methods in education were entirely new phenomena before the beginning of the 19th century. These new methods were not accepted by all educators as appropriate for the study of educational topics. Opposition to psychological science in education was based on the strong belief that education is a moral and philosophical endeavor, therefore its problems cannot be solved by scientific study. -
G. Stanley Hall
G. Stanley Hall (1844-1924), was the most influential psychologist in the United States in the 19th century. He founded "The Children's Study Movement" focused his interests on child development and evolutionary theory. He gave lectures on psychoeducational topics at Harvard University. He was professor of psychology and pedagogy at Johns Hopkins University where he founded the first laboratory for the study of psychology. He was the first president of the American Psychological Association. -
The Children's Study Movement
Hall in 1883 investigated children's conceptions of nature and questioned what children knew about different subjects in a kindergarten in Boston. This movement presented a vision that science could guide educational thinking and promoted the belief that anyone could be a scientist. Also that the data from the natural environment are at least the same as those from the laboratory. For the start of a series of new child-centered areas, such as experimental child psychology. -
William James
William James (1842-1910) established the psychology of humility, humor, and tolerance in the United States. In 1890 he published "The Principles of Psychology". James believed in education as a crucial element of society and in school as a place for habits to be acquired by design. His philosophy of pragmatism gave us social criteria to determine the truth. Testing whether the ideas were functional for the individual or for an animal led to the development of functionalism in psychology. -
The beginnings of APA and Educational Psychology
In 1891, Harvard administrators asked William James to lecture on the new psychology to teachers in Cambridge, Massachusetts. These talks were polished and expanded over the years and published in 1899 as "Talks with Psychology Teachers". With that book, we have the first text of educational psychology that included the speeches made for the first time in 1892. This year marked the beginnings of both the APA and the field of Educational Psychology in America. -
E. L. Thorndike
E. L. Thorndike (1874-1947), wrote his classic thesis "Animal Intelligence" in 1898. In addition to 50 books and 400 articles on psychology. I performed the first standardized performance test and developed intelligence tests. He believed that only empirical work should guide education, therefore quantitative experiments should be preferred to qualitative, clinical, or naturalistic observation. I create the learning theory that led to the development of operant conditioning within behaviorism. -
John Dewey
John Dewey (1859-1952), obtained his doctorate from Hopkins in 1884. He focused on the philosophy of education, pragmatism, and functionalism. His first article in psychology came out in 1896. He noted that stimuli and responses are inseparable entities and are produced as part of previous and future chains by the nature of experience. Dewey believed in a personal resume for each child. He also recognized the uniqueness of the teacher's role as a human being in a student community. -
Joseph Mayer Rice
Joseph Mayer Rice (1857-1934), the father of teaching research. He suffered great difficulties for his beliefs, before Thorndike's experimental psychology was considered acceptable. In 1897, in Atlantic City, New Jersey, Rice presented his empirical classroom-based research on the futility of spelling. The administrators of the school did not listen to his research because the psychology faculty was still dominant and therefore it was clear that the spelling faculty needed exercise. -
Powerful forces lined up against Dewey
When he was presenting the new education in the first yearbook of the United States Herbartian Commissioner of Education, William T. Harris (1897) was still advocating traditional methods. He expressed the four cardinal rules for efficient instruction: "The child must be regular in attendance and punctual in tasks, silent and hard-working to form his character. Obedience to authority was considered necessary to develop in the child a sense of responsibility and duty. -
Thorndike’s Puzzle Boxes
Thorndike's dissertation on "Animal Intelligence" marked the beginning of the systematic search for behavioral processes that laid the foundations for empirical behavioral science. Thorndike's trial and error puzzle box showed that the animals discovered the three things they had to do to get out and get their reward. When Thorndike placed them back in the same box, the animals did not need to go through the test and the error again which showed that they had learned to get out of the cage. -
Speeches and debates
For the first time in 1912, 48 speeches and debates were devoted to testing and measuring educational efficiency at the superintendents' meeting. Underlying the speeches and discussions was the proposition "that the effectiveness of the school, the methods, and the teachers must be measured in terms of the assured results." -
Before World War II
When World War II was near, Freeman (1938) commented that what had been achieved seemed to be superficial, addressing the shell, not the core, of the educational process. He speculated that the scientific movement that Thorndike led had gone as far as it could to improve education, the field went in the wrong direction. It was a time when members of educational psychology refused to take the world of schooling seriously. -
After World War II
Psychologists and educational psychologists found significant work to do in World War II. They tested, evaluated, and designed the instruction. The war did not require theoretical elegance from its psychologists. It required solving practical, not laboratory, problems, like the problem of quickly teaching masses of men to reach acceptable levels of proficiency in hundreds of specialty areas. With the help of psychologists, the task was accomplished. -
Dael Wolfle
Dael Wolfle (1906-2002), in 1947 gave a formula for writing books on educational and child psychology. In educational psychology texts, chapters should have titles such as: Classroom Learning and Measurement of Student Progress. He also added that when writing an educational psychology text, all references to subjects should be removed and the term student inserted, and the term children should be used in the text of child psychology. -
John B. Carroll
John B. Carroll (1916-2003), one of our most honored educational psychologists, published his model of school learning in 1963 and wrote about the discipline of educational psychology. He was the creator of one of the most elegant, parsimonious, and influential learning theories in our discipline, one derived from a practical problem of instruction, noting that the potential of educational psychology remained untapped because it seemed unrelated to genuine educational problems. -
Lee J. Cronbach
Lee J. Cronbach (1916-2001), at the 1974 APA convention, on the occasion of receiving one of the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Awards, Cronbach made it clear that inconsistent findings hampered certain types of progress in the psychological field. He said, "Once we deal with the interactions in our data, we will enter a mirror room that stretches to infinity." To understand individuals in their contexts, it is not such a bad aspiration. -
Instructional Psychology
A major area of educational psychology has been instructional psychology. Writing for the Annual Review of Psychology a decade ago, Lauren Resnick (1981) noted that the problems of real-world instruction were beginning to guide the development
of instructional psychology: An interesting thing has happened to instructional psychology. It has become part of the mainstream of research on human cognition, learning and development. -
The Psychology of School Subjects
The psychology of school subjects is not merely the commonsense psychology of Thorndike, but a cognitive psychological approach that is equally concerned about the thinking of the learner, the structure of the discipline to be learned, and the form of explanations available to the teacher. -
Methodology
Methodology in psychology increasingly has expanded to make use of (a) cases -as to document the genuine problems faced by real people in education; (b) naturalistic studies--so that psychologists may enhance external validity; (c) qualitative research and (d) small samples, intensively studied. -
Assessment
Nowadays psychologists see more concern for (a) the assessment of portfolios (b) performance tests (c) informal classroom assessment by teachers and (d) program evaluation which now is seen as a political process, to be conducted by a whole range of social scientists and humanistic scholars, to educate decision makers for making responsible choices in a democratic nation. -
Philip Jackson
Philip Jackson (1928-2015), put the problems of educational psychology directly at the feet of Thorndike who failed to distinguish between the objectives and the methods used in the physical and social sciences. Furthermore, it did not pay enough attention to the social and historical contexts in which people lived and in which schools operated. Thorndike had a blind faith that all the achievements of science were desirable. Finally, he also overlooked aesthetics. -
Redefining Educational Psychology
Many writers, particularly Wittrock (1967, 1992) and Berliner (1992), have pointed out that we should not think of ourselves as a sub-discipline or simply an applied discipline, which brings psychology to education. Richard Snow (1981) put it best: Our job is to psychologize on educational problems and issues and not simply to bring psychology to education. -
Research on Teaching
From the 1960s on, educational psychologists have developed a specialty area in research on teaching. From initial simple models of behavior using traditional psychological methodology, they have moved to more sophisticated, cognitively oriented, naturalistic, contextually sensitive, participatory studies. -
Other Trends
In every area of educational psychology, we see today more studies of psychoeducational phenomena, and more methods for the study of those phenomena, that are compatible with the ideas of our grandfathers and granduncles, William James, G. Stanley Hall, and John Dewey. The turn of the 19th century, however, was not their time to influence educational psychology; it was Thorndike's.
