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1961 BCE
Fifth century
In the fifth century B.C., Democritus, wrote on the advantages conferred by schooling and the influence of the home on learning. -
Period: 35 BCE to 100 BCE
Roman times
Quintilian argued in favor of public rather than private education to preserve democratic ideals--a battle still being fought today.
He condemned physical force as a method of discipline, commenting that good teaching and an attractive curriculum take care of most behavior problems -- advice that is as appropriate today as it was 2,000 years ago -
Period: 1492 to
Juan Luis Vives
The contributions of one of our many ancestors often are overlooked, yet Juan Luis Vives wrote very much as a contemporary educational psychologist might in the first part of the 16th century.
He wrote about individual differences and the need to adjust instruction for all students, but especially for the "feeble minded," the deaf, and the blind, anticipating the work of educational and school psychologists in special education and the area of aptitudetreatment interaction. -
Period: to
Comenius
Comenius, a humanist writing at the beginning of the modern era, also influenced both educational and psychoeducational thought (1657; Broudy, 1963). He wrote texts that were based on a developmental theory and in them inaugurated the use of visual aids in instruction. -
Period: to
Mid-19th century
Philosopher and psychologist, Johann Friedrich Herbart. He not only may be considered the first voice of the modern era of psychoeducational thought, but his disciples, the Herbartians, played a crucial role in preparing the way for the scientific study of education. They wrote about what we now call schema theory, advocating a cognitive psychology featuring the role of past experience and schemata in learning and retention. -
The Grandfather and Granduncles of Educational Psychology
Three individuals prepared the way to that victory so decisively won, eventually. These major figures were William James, his student G. Stanley Hall, and Hall's student, John Dewey. -
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William James
William James can be considered the central figure in the establishment of psychology in America.
James's (1890) Principles of Psychology, published in 1890 after 12 years of labor, was the preeminent event in American psychology (Barzun, 1983), although Professor James did not think so at the time. -
Period: to
G. Stanley Hall
G. Stanley, founder of the child-study movement that James worried about, was a promoter of psychology in ways that James must have found distasteful. Hall was APA's organizer and its first president. He was as much an educational psychologist as anything else we might label him, and that came to him naturally. -
Period: to
John Dewey
Dewey obtained his doctorate at Hopkins in 1884, with Hall as his advisor, although they appear not to have liked each other. Dewey wrote a psychology text in 1886, 4 years before James's Principles came out. Although well received, it was not a major intellectual event in the field. One of Dewey's very few empirical articles was published in 1894, the year he went to the then newly created University of Chicago. -
Period: to
Edward Lee Thorndike
Thorndike was a bright New England minister's son who, with his brothers, needed to get high grades to receive scholarships for college. Eventually, three Thorndikes became professors at Columbia University, attesting to the powerful values of the family. -
Period: to
Edward Lee Thorndike
Much has been written about E. L. Thorndike, and unquestionably our discipline has prospered because of his contributions. Thorndike's influence resulted in an arrogance on the part of educational psychologists, a closed-mindedness about the complexities of the life of the teacher and the power of the social and political influences on the process of schooling. -
John Dewey
His first major article in psychology came out; psychological article had immediate educational implications. If it was the whole act that constituted the basis for learning, then the prevalent form of instruction at that time had to be inappropriate. -
Paving the Way for Thorndike
In Atlantic City, New Jersey, Rice was asked to present his empirical classroom-based research on the futility of the spelling grind to the annual meeting of school superintendents. -
John Dewey
Dewey also recognized the uniqueness of the teacher's role as a fellow human being in a community of learners. In his presidential address to the APA in chose to discuss educational issues, particularly psychology and social practice. -
20th century
Although the Herbartians oversold their ideas and claimed a scientific base that they did not have, the educational psychologists at the turn of the 20th century owed them a monumental debt. 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. -
Science and Education
We must remember that before the turn of the 19th 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. -
Paving the Way for Thorndike
However, the climate had undergone a change. At that year's meeting of the superintendents, 48 addresses and discussions were devoted to tests and measurement of educational efficiency. -
Wolfle
Added that if you were writing an educational psychology text you had to delete all references to subjects and insert the term pupil, whereas if you were writing a child psychology text you had to use the term children instead of subjects. -
Journal of Genetic Psychology
Hall placed the pedagogical courses in the psychology department at Clark University and had them taught by W. F. Burnham, a psychologist he brought with him from Hopkins. -
Period: to
Sixtieth century
Plato and Aristotle discussed the following 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. -
Educational Psychology at Mid-Century
The APA Divisions of Evaluation and Measurement, Childhood and Adolescence, Personality and Social, School Psychology, and Maturity and Old Age appeared to have as much claim as we did on the study of such psychological functions as learning, adjustment, individual differences, tests and measurement, statistics, and growth and development. -
Research on Teaching
We have developed a specialty area in research on teaching (see Gage, 1963). From initial simple models of behavior using traditional psychological methodology, we have moved to more sophisticated, cognitively oriented, naturalistic, contextually sensitive, participatory studies. -
The Nether Side of Thorndike's Influence
McDonald called that period before World War II the nadir of the profession, and this is partially true, although it was also a function of a great depression. -
Period: to
Redefining Educational Psychology
If we are to sustain the changes in our field that are now occurring, the definition of educational psychology will have to be modified. Many writers, particularly Wittrock and Berliner, have remarked that we should not think of ourselves as a subdiscipline or merely an applied discipline, carrying psychology to education. -
The Origins of Educational Psychology
Our field probably started unnoticed and undistinguished, as part of the folk traditions of people trying to educate their young. The ancient Jewish ritual of Passover precedes the contemporary work of Cronbach and Snow by hundreds if not thousands of years, yet fully anticipates their scholarship into aptitude-treatment interactions. -
The Psychology of School Subjects
A resurgence of interest in schooling by educational psychologists was described, appropriately enough, in the G. Stanley Hall Lecture Series by Lee Shulman, over a decade ago. He and his students have once again brought to the forefront of educational psychology the study of school subjects, demonstrating a concern for practice and the problems of instruction in the real world