Edward Thorndike
1874 – 1949 American psychologist, educational reformer
American psychologist who founded educational psychology and the testing movement, applying measurement and sorting to schooling; his views included support for eugenic ideas that scholars now criticize.
- Affiliations
- Teachers College, Columbia University
Edward Lee Thorndike was a founder of educational psychology and one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century American schooling. From Teachers College at Columbia he built the study of learning on experiments, formulating the law of effect and arguing that responses followed by satisfaction are strengthened. He promoted standardized tests, measurement, and the idea that schools should identify and sort pupils by ability, a stance that shaped tracking and mass testing. He offered a behaviorist, measurement-driven alternative to John Dewey's more child-centered progressivism. Thorndike also expressed hereditarian and eugenic views, holding that intelligence was largely inborn and unequally distributed, positions later scholars have criticized and read as part of the era's eugenics movement.
Connections
- associate of Frederick Winslow Taylor — Carried the logic of efficiency and measurement from Taylor's factory into the classroom.
- associate of Frederick Winslow Taylor — The efficiency and measurement Taylor brought to industry ran parallel to Thorndike's push to measure and sort pupils.
- associate of John D. Rockefeller — Worked within the era of mass schooling that Rockefeller's General Education Board and Carnegie money helped standardize; the philanthropies funded testing and school reform he championed.
- rival of John Dewey — Offered a testing and measurement approach to schooling that stood against Dewey's child-centered progressivism.