-
400 BCE
PLATO AND ARISTOTLE
Discussed the educational psychology
topics: the kinds of education appropriate to different
kinds of people; the training of the body and the cultivation of psychomotor skills; the formation of good character; the effects of music, poetry, and the other arts on the development of the individual; the role of the teacher; the relations between teacher and student; the nature of learning; -
35 BCE
100 BCE (35-100 A.D.)
During Roman times, Quintilian argued in favor of public rather than private education.He condemned physical force as a method of discipline,He urged that teachers take
into account individual differences, suggesting that they take time to study the unique characteristics of their students. He also set forth criteria for teacher selection.
. Quintilian's arguments, although archaic in form, are still functional educational psychology. -
(1776 -1841)
Johann Friedrich Herbart played a crucial role for the scientific study of education his disciples wrote about what we now call schema theory, advocating a cognitive psychology featuring the role of past experience and schemata in learning and retention.They promoted the five formal steps for teaching virtually any subject matter: preparation (of the mind of the student), (b) presentation (of the material to be learned),comparison, generalization, and application. -
18 century
Experimental methods in education were brand new phenomena. These new methods were not accepted
by all as appropriate to the study of educational topics.
The Herbartians had played an important role in
convincing the teachers and school administrators of America that education was a
field that could be studied scientifically.
Herbart was an
empiricist, dedicated to observational methods, and a developer of mathematical psychology. But he maintained that one could not experiment with it. -
(1857- 1934)
Joseph Mayer Rice was the father of research on teaching, he endured great difficulties for his beliefs just a few years before the
experimental psychology of E. L. Thorndike was deemed acceptable, Rice was asked to present his empirical classroom-based research on the futility of the spelling grind -
William James
William James (1842-1910James's version of psychological science argued against the elementalism of the Europeans, giving us the notion that consciousness was continuous stream .But in that philosophy he gave us another set of uniquely American views, called pragmatism, in which the test for truth was whether or not ideas worked for the individual. As a result, James took away the eternal verities of Aristotle and the revealed truths of religion and gave us social criteria for determining truth. -
19 th century
EDWARD LEE THORNDIKE
Took up experimental psychology, puzzle box.
Thorndike was brought to Teachers College as an instructor
in psychology, where he remained a dorninant force in psychology for 43 years,writing 50 books and 400 articles, all without a typewriter or a calculator. Thorndike believed that only empirical work should guide education. His faith in experimental psychological science and statistics was unshakable. -
Jhon Dewy
John Dewey (1859-1952), were, like
James's, in three intertwined fields of study: philosophy, psychology, and pedagogy. Dewey argued that what held together stimuli and their responses were the interpretations given to both, thus putting consciousness,attribution, and constructivist views squarely before the emerging stimulus response (S-R) psychologists of that time.Dewey's important psychological article (1896) had immediate educational implications. -
1900
G. Stanley Hall (1844-1924), founder of the child-study movement that James worried about, was a promoter of psychology in ways that James must have found distasteful.Hall is remembered at Hopkins by the APA for founding the first English language
psychology journal, the American Journal of Psychology. But Hall also founded the second English language psychological journal in America, and it was an educational psychology journal. -
1960
John B. Carroll, one of our most honored educational
psychologists, published his model of school learning he wrote about the discipline of educational psychology and noted that the potential of educational psychology remained untapped because it seemed not to be concerned with genuine educational problems. -
20 century
In the 19th and 20th centuries, public schooling gradually evolved toward what we all recognize today as conventional schooling. The methods of discipline became more humane, or at least less corporal.
Philip Jackson (1981)laid the problems of our field squarely
at Thorndike's feet. He cited four ways in which the introduction to the maiden issue of the Journal of Educational Psychology set the stage for the difficulties that would follow
