The origins of educational psychology

  • 100 BCE

    During 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 disciplin.
  • Jan 2, 1500

    Juan Luis Vives

    Wrote very much as a contemporary educational psychologist might in the first part of the 16th century (1531/1913). He wrote on practical knowledge and the need to engage student interest. He wrote about learning being dependent on self-activity.
  • Juan Amos 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
  • Mid-19th century

    Philosopher and psychologist, Johann Friedrich Herbart (17761841). He wrote about what we now call schema theory.
  • From the very beginning of the APA, psychoeducational issues were important to our leaders, and those issues influenced the growth of academic and scientific psychology.

    The time period for those events was approximately 1890 to 1910, the same years that saw American psychology separate from its. European roots and grow into a uniquely American discipline.
  • Harvard's administrators

    Asked James to provide some lectures on the new psychology to the teachers of Cambridge
  • Edward Lee Thorndike

    Thorndike was brought to Teachers College as an instructor in psychology
  • The 19th century

    Experimental methods in education were brand new phenomena
  • William James

    He can be considered the central figure in the establishment of psychology in America
  • 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.
  • G. Stanley Hall

    Founder of the child-study movement that James worried about, was a promoter of psychology in ways that James must have found distasteful.
  • Joseph Mayer Rice

    The father of research on teaching.
  • Edward Lee Thorndike

    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.
  • Wolfle

    Added that if you were writing an educational psychology text you had to delete all references to subjects and insert the term pupil
  • A. D. Woodruff

    Noted that educational psychology had no domain that was really its own to any greater extent than it belonged to others.
  • In the fifth century B.C

    Democritus, for example, wrote on the advantages conferred by schooling and the influence of the home on learning (Watson, 1961)
  • The contemporary work of Cronbach and Snow

    By hundreds if not thousands of years, yet fully anticipates their scholarship into aptitude-treatment interactions
  • To reflect on any act of teaching and learning demands thinking about individual differences, assessment, development

    The nature of the subject matter being taught, problem solving, and transfer of learning.
  • Philip Jackson

    Writing a decade ago, 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
  • Study to organize the American Psychological Association (APA) (Hothersall, 1984).

    Study to organize the American Psychological Association (APA) (Hothersall, 1984).