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428 BCE
Plato and Aristotle
The Origins of Educational Psychology Plato believed that all knowledge is innate at birth and is perfectible by experiential learning during growth. Aristotle, Plato's student, was the first to observe that "association" among ideas facilitated understanding and recall. He believed that comprehension was aided by contiguity, succession, similarity and contras -
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384 BCE
Aristotle
Aristotle believed the purpose of school was to develop and exercise students' potential for reasoning, form ethical character, and provide a skill and knowledge base. He thought the purpose of schooling was to develop dispositions and habits that exercise reason and forming a human's ethos. -
Comenius
Comenius
John Comenius (1592-1670) was a Moravian clergyman, and the first person to recognize the age differences in children's ability to learn. He also noticed that children learn more effectively when they are involved with experiences that they can assimilate -
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John Locke
John Locke advanced the hypothesis that people learn primarily from external forces. He believed that the mind was like a blank was tablet (tabula rasa) and that successions of simple impressions give rise to complex ideas through association and reflection. Locke is credited with establishing "empiricism" as a criterion for testing the validity of knowledge, thus providing a conceptual framework for later development of excremental methodology in the natural and social sciences. -
Rousseau
In France, during the mid 18th century, Jean Jacques Rousseau put forth a new theory of educational pedagogy. In his famous work Emile, published in1762, he explained his views on the benefits of health and physical exercise, and the belief that knowledge acquisition occurs though experience and that reason and investigation should replace arbitrary authority. He proposed educating children according to their natural inclinations, impulses and feelings. -
Pestalozzi
Some people consider Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746-1827) to be the first applied educational psychologist. He was one of the first educators who attempted to put Rousseau's teaching into practice and teach children by drawing upon their natural interests and activities. -
Herbart
Johann Friedrich Herbart is acknowledged as the "father of scientific pedagogy"He was the first scientist to distinguish instructional process from subject matter. According to Herbart, interest develops when already strong and vivid ideas are hospitable towards new ones,thus past associations motivate apperception of current ones. Herbartianism, inpredicting that learning follows from building up sequences of ideas importantto the individual, gave teachers a semblance of a theory of motivation -
Wundt
Herbartian psychology led to the founding of Wilhelm Wundt's laboratory in1879. Wundt extended Herbart's theory of apperception into a theory of consciousness, whereby he sought to explain associations among mental processes. -
Dewey
In 1896, John Dewey launched an attack against Titchener and his ideas. Dewey believed that individuals address aspects of their environment, not because these features possess the qualities of being interesting, but because they are viewed instrumentally always of realizing a purpose. This belief gave rise to the theory of "functionalism". Functionalism encouraged developments in mental testing, investigation of individual differences, and studies of adaptive behavior. -
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Titchener
One of Wundt's students, Edward Bradford Titchener (1867- 1927) was one of the first eminent Educational Psychologists to practice in America. He was director of the psychology laboratory at Cornell University, and he regarded the study of the generalized mind to be the only legitimate purpose of psychological investigation. He focused on such higher mental processes as concept formation and argued that introspection is a valid form for interpreting a great variety of sensations and feelings. -
Thorndike
Edward L. Thorndike (1874-1949) disdained what he considered to be intuitive, common-sense psychology. He agreed with functionalism, but preferred to be identified as a "connectionist" because he sought to explain learning in terms of stimulus-response connections. He is credited with establishing the "Law of Effect" to account for the strengthening or weakening of connections as a result of experience. -
Piaget
Was one of the most powerful researchers in the area of developmental psychology during the 20th century. He developed the theory of cognitive development. The theory stated that intelligence developed in four different stages. -
Piaget's stage of cognitive development
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B. F Skinner
The work of Skinner was rooted in the view that classical conditioning was far too simplistic to be a complete explanation of complex human behavior. He believed that the best way to understand behavior is to look at the causes of an action and its consequences. He called this approach operant conditioning.
Operant conditioning is a method of learning that occurs through rewards and punishments for behavior. -
Operant conditioning
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Benjamin Bloom
He spent over 50 years at the University of Chicago, where he worked in the department of education. He believed that all students can learn. He developed a taxonomy of educational objectives.
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Jerome Bruner
Is notable for integrating Piaget's cognitive approaches into educational psychology. He advocated for discovery learning where teachers create a problem-solving environment that allows the student to question, explore, and experiment. In his book, The Process of Education Bruner stated that the structure of the material and the cognitive abilities of the person are important in learning. He emphasized the importance of the subject matter.
