The History of Educational Psychology timeline

Plato. All knowledge is innate and perfectible. He suggested that the brain is the mechanism of mental processes.
Aristotle. The "association" between ideas facilitated understanding and recall. He suggested that the heart is the mechanism of mental processes.
They both discussed the types of education appropriate for different types of people, the relationships between teacher and student, the means and methods of teaching, and the nature of learning.

Among his contributions, he stands out by supporting the education of women, induction as a method of study, and the study of nature. He wrote a lot about contemporary educational psychology. He pointed out that to learn you have to practice it. He focused on individual differences and the need for equal education, especially for the "feeble-minded," such as the deaf and blind, anticipating the work of educational and school psychologists in special education.

He wrote texts based on developmental theory and where the use of visual aids in instruction is seen for the first time. He taught that understanding, not memory, is the goal of instruction; that we learn best when we have the opportunity to teach it; and that parents have a fundamental role in their children's schooling. He described the school system that is used in many countries today, beginning with kindergarten, elementary school, high school, college, and ending with the university.

Locke defended his hypothesis that people learn mainly from external forces. He argued that the mind was a "tabula rasa", that is, a blank sheet where human beings write everything they learn and that the successions of simple impressions gave rise to complex ideas through association and reflection. Locke is credited with the term "empiricism" which holds that learning occurs based on experience.

Rousseau presented the belief that the acquisition of knowledge occurs through experience and reason. He considered education as the ideal way to train free citizens aware of their rights and duties. In his postulates, he emphasizes that the education of children should be according to their natural impulses, the importance of stimulating the desire to learn, and the idea that the education of the child begins from birth and should be prevented from acquiring habits of who could become a slave.

Pestalozzi based his work on Rousseau, where teaching children should be based on their natural interests. His approach was based on two main premises: first, children need an emotionally safe environment for successful learning, and second, instruction must begin with sensations. He used the principle of Anschauung, a process that involved the formation of clear concepts from the impressions of the senses. Object teaching was the most popular and widely adopted element of Pestalozzianism.

He empathized with the importance of interest in motivation. According to him, interest develops when ideas already implanted connect with new ones, so that past associations motivate the perception of current ones. Herbartianism, learning follows from building up sequences of ideas important to the individual. He promoted the five formal steps for teaching any subject: preparation of the student's mind, presentation of the material to be learned, comparison, generalization, and application.

He was the founder of the kindergarten, he used to say that "Children are like tiny flowers; they are varied and need care, but each one is alone beautiful and glorious when seen in the community of peers." He believed in the idea that children learned better by playing rather than by direct instruction from the teacher. His philosophies of education, through hands-on activities, still live on today. Teachers apply his ideas and strategies as part of their teaching techniques.

He proposed a theory to apply the theory of evolution to sociology, especially to education and class struggle. He defined that the purpose and task of education were to teach everyone how to live fully. Spencer advocated student-based machine learning and highlighted the role of interest in the teaching process. He defined 3 types of education; intellectual: do not learn by memory, moral: teach that all actions have consequences and physical: avoid mental fatigue and conservation of the earth.

Wundt is recognized for being the creator of the first laboratory of Experimental Psychology. He introduced the use of experimental methods in psychology, setting aside rational analysis. He investigated the immediate experiences of consciousness, such as sensations, ideas, and feelings, he also explored the fundamental concepts related to apperception (conscious perception) and introspection (conscious examination of conscious experience).

James is regarded as the "father of American psychology". His Darwinian approach helped introduce the theory to psychology, he believed that man inherited many instincts (more than other animals). He argued that memory is enhanced when it is organized, and "cramming" is a poor strategy because we make few connections in a short time and knowledge does not stay. He contributed to functionalism, one of the earliest schools of thought in psychology.

Dewey pointed out that stimuli and responses occur as part of previous and future chains because that is the nature of experience. He believed that individuals engage with aspects of their environment, not because they are interesting, but because they are ways of fulfilling a purpose. This was denominated "functionalism". Dewey proposed a school, which would be based on an experimental method that would develop in children the necessary skills to solve the problems that were presented to them.

He was the founder of structuralist psychology, which focused on the analysis of mental processes through introspection. He considered the study of the mind to be the only purpose of psychological research. He focused on mental processes such as concept formation and argued that insight is a valid way to interpret a wide variety of sensations and feelings. He had the objective of analyzing the mind from the basic elements that make it up, and how these come together to form complex processes.

Thorndike was one of the first psychologists to combine learning theory, psychometrics, and applied research on school-related topics to form educational psychology.
Thorndike was "connectionist" because he sought to explain learning in terms of stimulus-response connections, which become stronger each time they bring about a satisfactory state of affairs for the organism. He is credited with the "Law of Effect" to explain the strengthening or weakening of connections as a result of experience.

He is best known for his theory of cognitive development, which looks at how children develop intellectually throughout childhood. He affirms that children learn and develop their knowledge in 4 clearly defined stages, which he defined as genetic epistemology. Through this, he established structures through which human beings learn about the world. He wanted to establish the relationship between age and the nature of the mistakes made at each stage.

He is mainly known for his contributions in the field of psychometrics around the measurement of phenomena such as intelligence, language skills, or academic performance. The theory of the three strata of intelligence proposes that the factorial structure of human cognitive aptitudes is composed of a general intellectual capacity (the g factor), a set of 8 broad abilities, and a third stratum that would include more specific intellectual aptitudes and dependent on one of the previous ones.

Its objective was to investigate the influence exerted by the social and cultural environment in the development of certain behavior patterns in children. Vygotsky considered that the social environment is crucial for learning, he thought that it is produced by the integration of social and personal factors. The phenomenon of social activity helps explain changes in consciousness and supports a psychological theory that unifies behavior and mind.

His research was based on the relationships between contextual and social factors and learning processes. With his Bobo doll experiment, he demonstrated that learning is social because it involves the community. Students learn from the behavior of their parents, teachers, and peers, not just from the topic discussed in class. His social learning theory is based on the idea that children learn in social settings by observing and imitating the behavior they have seen.