Early Research in Educational Psychology

Twenty-one schools active in training educational psychologists early in the century have been identified. Three major journals publishing educational psychology research between 1910 and 1925 were studied to determine the nature and extent of research performed in the institutions. Productivity ranged from high to low, with about one third of studies devoted to intelligence and its measurement, and one third devoted to other aspects of measurement. Educational psychologists professed to be concerned primarily with learning, but only about 10% of their research focused on learning. Examination of textbooks of the period revealed that authors' sources of evidence primarily came from traditional education (mostly methods) books, secondarily from traditional general psychology books, and very little from educational psychology research. However described, early educational psychologists were primarily psychometrists, depending on traditional education and psychology for the data they espoused.