Origins of Educational Psychology

Democritus

500 BCE

Wrote on the advantages conferred by schooling and the influence of the home on learning.

Plato and Aristotle

400 BCE

Discussed some educational psychology topics, for example: the kinds of education appropriate to different kinds of people, the training of the body and the cultivation of phychomotor skills, etc.

Quintilian

50

He urged that teachers take into account individual differences, suggesting that they take time to study the unique characteristics of their students.

Juan Luis Vives

1500

He wrote about individual differences and the need to adjust instruction for all students.especially for the "feeble minded", the deaf and the blind.

Commenius

1600

He taught that understanding, not memory, is the goal of instruction.

Johann Friedrich Herbart

1840

He 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

1900

James´s version of psychology science argued against the elementalism of the Europeans, giving us the notion that consciousness was continuos a stream and not easily divisible. He recognized that psychologists could not tell educators precisely what to do.

G. Stanley Hall

1900

Founder of the child-study movement that James worried about, was a prometer of psychology in ways that James must have found distasteful. Is remembered for founding the first English language psychology journal, the "American Journal of Psychology".

E. L. Thorndike

1903

Father of educational psychology. Wrote "Educational Psychology". He researched about individual differences and devise different kinds of tests to measure the intelectual capacity and aptitudes.

John Dewey

1940

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.
He felt that the individual´s internal processes must be understood.