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Prominent Pioneers in Educational Psychology
Prominent Pioneers in Educational Psychology
Lewis Terman was known for his research on intelligence, and in particular on
the gifted. He
translated the Binet test of intelligence into English, set new age norms and
standardized the scores.
His version came to be called the Stanford-Binet test.
Lewis Terman grew up in rural Indiana, where he was the 12 th of 14 children,
from a prosperous
farming family. Terman received a BS from a local teachers college, MA from
Indiana University,
and his Ph.D. from Clark University in Massachusetts. His dissertation was n
comparing mental and
physical abilities of children from different ability groups. Terman worked as a
high school principal
and then as a professor at teachers college. In 1910, Stanford offered him a job
in the Department of
Education. Terman later transferred to the psychology department which he
chaired for 20 years.
He wrote the book "The Measurement of Intelligence". Working with other
psychologists during
World War I, Terman was largely responsible for the first notable group
intelligence tests, the Army
Alpha and the Army Beta. Terman also published the Terman Group Test of
Mental Ability in 1920,
and he co-authored the Stanford Achievement Test, which was revised many
times and continued to
be widely used in the 1980's. Educational Psychology (PSY406) VU Reading
Material for Educational Psychology 7
Terman defined intelligence as "the ability to carry on abstract thinking" and
used the label IQ or
Intelligence Quotient.
Terman's studies undoubtedly are still the most recognized and frequently
quoted research on the
gifted children. His last progress report on this continuing study was The Gifted
Child Grows Up
(1947).
Among Terman's most interesting findings from his study of the development of
gifted children
were that they tended to be healthier and more stable emotionally than the
average children. He said
that gifted children excelled in measures of academic achievement. He found
that gifted children did
not fit the existing stereotypes often associated with them: they were not weak
and sickly social
misfits, but in fact were generally taller, in better health, better developed
physically, and better
adapted socially than other children. He was the psychologist who developed
some of the earliest and
a laboratory school
at the University of Chicago. His first major work on education is The School
and Society (1899). His
interest in educational theory continued during his later work at Teachers
College in Columbia. This
lead to the publication of "How We Think", an application of his theory of
knowledge to education,
and Democracy and Education is perhaps his most important work in the field.
Dewey was also an educational reformer and a pioneer in the field of
educational psychology. In
education he stressed on learning by doing, as opposed to authoritarian
teaching methods and rote
learning. In 1886 he wrote the first American psychology textbook, titled
Psychology.
Hermann Ebbinghaus
The German psychologist, Hermann Ebbinghaus developed techniques for the
experimental study of
memory and forgetting. Before Ebbinghaus, these higher mental processes had
never been Educational Psychology (PSY406) VU Reading Material for
Educational Psychology 8
scientifically studied, the importance of this work for the practical world of
education was
immediately recognized.
Granville Stanley Hall
He was an American psychologist and an educator. Hall was a child psychologist
whose theories of
child psychology strongly influenced the educational psychology. He was a
pioneer in developing
psychology in United States. His wide ranging and prolific writings reveal a
central theme best
characterized as genetic psychology or evolutionism. In 1878 under the
guidance of his friend
William James, he received from Harvard the first doctorate in psychology ever
given in the United
States.
From 1882 -1888 he taught psychology at Johns Hopkins University. There, Hall
objected
vehemently to the emphasis on teaching traditional subjects e.g. Latin,
mathematics, science and
history, in high school, arguing instead that high school should focus more on
the education of
adolescents than on preparing students for college.
He set about building up the first American laboratory for psychology. In 1887
he founded and
edited the American Journal of Psychology, the first journal of its kind in the
United States. In 1892
about fifteen psychologists drew up plan for the American Psychological