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500 BCE
Democritus
In the fifth century B.C., Democritus, for example, wrote on the advantages conferred by schooling and the influence of the home on learning. A century later, Plato and Aristotle discussed the following educational psychology topics. -
100 BCE
Quintilian
During Roman times, Quintilian (35-100 A.D.)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. -
1492
Juan Luis Vives
Juan Luis Vives (1492- 1540) wrote very much as a contemporary educational psychologist might in the first part of the 16th century. . He stated to teachers and others with educational responsibilities, such as those in government and commerce, that there should be an orderly presentation of the facts to be learned, and in this way he anticipated Herbart and the 19th-century psychologists. -
John Amos Comenius
John Amos Comenius (1592-1671), a humanist writing at the beginning of the modern era, also influenced both educational and psychoeducational thought. He wrote texts that were based on a developmental theory and in them inaugurated the use of visual aids in instruction. He recommended that instruction start with the general and then move to the particular. He taught that understanding, not memory, is the goal of instruction. -
Johann Friedrich Herbart
Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776-1841). 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. -
William James
William James (1842-1910) can be considered the central figure in the establishment of psychology in America. Compared with his contemporary. His was a psychology of humility, humor, and tolerance. James's version of psychological science argued against the elementalism of the Europeans, giving us the notion that consciousness was continuous-a stream-and not easily divisible. Moreover, and still more startling, he said consciousness chooses-it controls its own attention. -
G. Stanley Hall
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 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. -
Joseph Mayer Rice
Joseph Mayer Rice (1857- 1934), the father of research on teaching. Rice endured great difficulties for his beliefs just a few years before the experimental psychology of E. L. Thorndike was deemed acceptable. -
John Dewey
John Dewey (1859-1952) Dewey wrote a psychology text in 1886, 4 years before James's Principles came out. His first major article in psychology came out in 1896. It was on the relations between stimuli and responses, and it had a particular American flavor to it. Dewey and his colleagues at the University of Chicago founded the functionalist school of psychology, a way of thinking about psychology that was strongly influenced by Darwin. -
Edward Lee Thorndike
Edward Lee Thorndike (1874-1949) was an American psychologist who spent nearly his entire career at Teachers College, Columbia University. His work on comparative psychology and the learning process led to the theory of connectionism and helped lay the scientific foundation for educational psychology. . He was bright, brash, amazingly productive, and as he proceeded to organize the field, he revealed an unshakable faith that psychological science could solve many of the ills of society. -
The Journal of Genetic Psychology
The Journal of Genetic Psychology: Research and Theory on Human Development is a quarterly peer-reviewed scientific journal covering developmental psychology. The first scholarly journal devoted to the field of developmental psychology, it was established in 1891 by G. Stanley Hall. -
Philip Jackson
Philip Jackson (1981) 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. Jackson (1981) also noted, the final blow to Thorndikian conceptions of educational science came from our own highly respected educational psychologist.