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499 BCE
The Origins of Educational Psychology
Fifth century B.C., Democritus, wrote on the advantages
conferred by schooling and the influence of the home on learning. -
399 BCE
The Origins of Educational Psychology
A century later, 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; the possibilities and limits of moral education; 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. -
Period: 35 to 100
Roman times
Quintilian argued in favor of public rather than private education to preserve democratic ideals. He condemned physical force as a method of discipline, commenting that good teaching and an attractive curriculum take care of most behavior problems. He urged that teachers takeinto account individual differences, suggesting that they take time to study the unique characteristics of their students. He also set forth criteria for teacher selection. -
1531
Juan Luís Vives
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. He noted that what is to be learned must be practiced. He wrote on practical knowledge and the need to engage student interest. 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. -
John Amos Comenius
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 and that nothing in books be accepted unless checked by a demonstration to the senses. He taught that understanding, not memory, is the goal of instruction; that we learn best that which we have an opportunity to teach; and that parents have a role to play in the schooling of their children. -
Johann Friedrich Herbart
In the mid-19th century, Herbart 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. They promoted the five formal steps for teaching virtually any subject matter: (a) preparation (of the mind of the student), (b) presentation (of the material to be learned), (c) comparison, (d) generalization, and (e) application. -
Granville 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. Hall was APA's organizer and its first president. Eliot rode asked the impoverished Hall to deliver a series of public lectures on education, under the auspices of the university. The delivery of that Saturday morning series of talks
on psychology and education preceded James's by about a decade. -
William James
James's Principles of Psychology, published in 1890 after 12 years of labor, was the preeminent event in American psycholog, although Professor James did not think so at the time. When he finally sent the manuscript to his publisher, Henry Holt, he wrote 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. -
John Dewey
Dewey wrote a psychology text 4 years before James's Principles came out. One of Dewey's very few empirical articles was published in 1894, the year he went to the then newly created University of Chicago. It was an article on the relative frequency of word use by young children, probably his own (Dewey, 1894). His first major article in psychology came out in 1896.
Dewey's important psychological article (1896) had immediate educational implications. -
Joseph Mayer Rice
Rice is considered 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 to the annual meeting of school superintendents. -
The Superintendents
The superintendents, 48 addresses and discussions were devoted to tests and measurement of educational efficiency. Underlying the addresses and discussions was the proposition "that the effectiveness of the school, the methods, and the teachers must be measured in terms of the results secured". -
Frank N. Freeman
He wrote the conclusion to the 1938 yearbook of the
National Society for the Study of Education, a publication summarizing the achievements of the scientific movement in education. Freeman (1938) remarked that what had been accomplished appeared to be superficial, addressing the husk, not the kernel, of the educational process. He speculated that the scientific movement that Thorndike headed had gone as far as it could in improving education. -
Dael Wolfle
He wrote about psychological textbooks and gave a formula for writing textbooks in educational and child psychology. He said,
"If you wish to write an educational psychology text, start with a good average introductory text". 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. -
John B. Carroll
One of our most honored educational psychologists, published his model of school learning, he also wrote about the discipline of educational psychology. The creator of one of our discipline's most elegant, parsimonious, and influential theories of learning, one
derived from a practical problem of instruction, noted that the potential of educational psychology remained untapped because it seemed not to be concerned with genuine educational problems. -
Philip Jackson
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 set the stage for the difficulties that would follow. In that introduction, Thorndike first failed to distinguish between the goals of and the methods used in the physical and the social sciences. Finally, Thorndike overlooked the aesthetic dimension of science.
