Who is thorndike

It is basically a multiple choice questions conducted under the supervision of United States military entrance processing command used to assess the qualifications needed to list the eligible candidates for United States Armed Forces. Edward Thorndike played a remarkable role in contributing to the field of psychology. Animal psychology and behaviorism are his major fields of accomplishments including many others. He has won prestigious accolades as an accomplished psychologist including the designation of the president of American Psychological Association as well as the well deserved membership at National Academy of Arts in He died on August 9th, Reward is preferable since it is more efficient to forestall inappropriate responses by producing and rewarding desired behavior than by punishing incorrect responses; a positive pedagogy is preferable to a punitive one.

As a result of empirical studies undertaken in the late s and s, however, Thorndike concluded that he had been mistaken earlier.

Punished responses are not weakened as rewarded connections are strengthened; despite common sense and tradition, punishment may actually enhance the probability that an undesired response will be repeated.

Thorndike was virtually the first educator to give theoretical and empirical attention to effect, although reward and punishment had been given practical attention by generations of schoolmen. Still, the pedagogical emphasis at the turn of the century centered on punitive and repressive measures and on fault-finding.

In Thorndike warned teachers that the most common violation of human nature was the failure to reward desired behavior. In propounding the law of effect, then, Thorndike gave a psychologist's support to those educational philosophers, like John Dewey, and those founders of Progressive schools, like Marietta Johnson, who wished to make schools more humane and to have them better relate educational methods to the nature of childhood.

However, because of his articulation of another law of learning—the law of exercise—Thorndike's psychology differed from that Progressivist thinking which emphasized spontaneity and favored student selection of activities and freedom from a planned curriculum sequence and from drill.

The law of exercise states that once a given response is made to a particular stimulus, each recurrence of that stimulus tends to recall that response; hence, an S-R bond is being strengthened. The educational implication of the law promotes drill, or practice, of desired responses and careful teacher attention to forming appropriate habits.

Intellect and character are strengthened not by any subtle and easy metamorphosis, but by the establishment of particular ideas and acts under the law of habit …. The price of a disciplined intellect and will is eternal vigilance in the formation of habits ….

Habit rules us but it also never fails us. The mind does not give us something for nothing, but it never cheats. A radical educational theory stressing freedom, spontaneity, inner direction, and "unfolding," one that "stands out of nature's way," was to Thorndike a "something for nothing" pedagogy. In its place, Thorndike's psychology required the careful ordering of learning tasks, as in the Thorndike Arithmetics , which he prepared for school use; practice exercise, drill with reward; and measurement of progress through frequent testing, preferably by standardized tests so that more reliable estimates of learning could be had.

Another "something for nothing" educational theory—this one from the conservative, formalistic right wing of educational opinion—was the belief in mental formal discipline: that various mental or perceptual faculties are strengthened by being exercised upon some formal, preferably difficult task; that the study of a rigorously logical subject, like geometry, promotes logical behavior; and that practice in accurate copying transfers to other behavior, making one more accurate generally.

Some skepticism about transfer of training had already developed, on a priori grounds, before Thorndike published the first major empirical challenge to this widely held theory. The proponents of more modern subjects—vocational courses, the modern languages, physical education, even the sciences—had attacked formal discipline and faculty psychology because the defenders of the classical studies had based classical domination of the curriculum primarily on the grounds that these difficult and abstruse subjects, which were unappreciated by pupils, had tremendous transferability value, just as lifting the heaviest weights develops muscle power better than lighter burdens do.

Between and , Thorndike's research supported those educational reformers who believed that a subject or skill should be included in the curriculum because of its intrinsic value, and not because of unproved assertions about transfer power. In his Educational Psychology, Thorndike wrote: "We conquer the facts of nature when we observe and experiment upon them. When we measure them we have made them our servants" , p. Equally as important as empiricism to Thorndike's psychology was his emphasis on measurement and quantification; poorly prepared by the schools in mathematics and largely self-taught in statistics, Thorndike became the educational world's exponent of the use of science's universal language of description, numbers.

His theme was, all that exists, exists in some amount and can be measured. He introduced the first university course in educational measurement in , and two years later he wrote the first handbook for researchers in the use of social statistics, An Introduction to the Theory of Mental and Social Measurements. Educational and intellectual tests. The movement toward testing was the primary outcome of attempts to translate qualitative statements Mary seems to be having trouble in reading into quantitative and comparable terms In grade 5.

Standardized achievement tests in school subjects were built on centuries of use of teacher-made tests. What the twentieth century added was the standardization necessary for reliability and comparison of results from class to class. Professionally written and administered to thousands of pupils, using norms based on nationwide samples of students, achievement tests were created for every level of schooling, from primary through graduate school, including tests for out-of-school adults at various age levels.

In use of these tests was established when 2 million pupils took standardized tests of academic achievement; thereafter, growth in the use and development of tests was virtually taken for granted.

Thorndike contributed several works on construction of tests and devised various tests of his own: rating scales for handwriting, drawing, and composition; tests of oral and silent reading skill, geographical knowledge, English usage, spelling, reading and reasoning; and college entrance tests and law-school entrance examinations.

Intelligence and scholastic aptitude tests have a shorter history but have been even more crucial in shaping school practices like promotion policies, grouping, and grading and professional and public thinking.

Alfred Binet's point scale, developed in France early in the twentieth century, is the landmark contribution. But before such testing could have great educational or social impact, it was necessary to find means of adapting the individually administered, Binet-type artifact tasks to groups using paper and pencil.

This did not come about until World War I, when the U. Army commissioned psychologists to prepare and administer tests to aid in classifying recruits. Thorndike was a member of the Committee on Classification of Personnel from to and supervised work on the Beta form the form for illiterate recruits ; it and the Alpha form for literates were administered to 2 million soldiers by , the world's first effort in the mass measurement of intelligence. Within three years, 1 million schoolchildren took similar tests, many of them the National Intelligence Test which a group of former army psychologists, including Thorndike, had developed.

He later devised the CAVD sentence completion, arithmetic, vocabulary, following directions intelligence examination and a nonlanguage scale for illiterates. Aside from the kind of general intelligence measurements which concern educators most, Thorndike was interested in other types of aptitudes, believing that intelligence is not a unitary or general factor but is constituted of millions of discrete stimulus-response bonds; any intelligence test is simply a selective sample-taking of all the possible learned connections that might be present.

Thorndike believed that since individuals differ, primarily by heredity, in their relative ability to form connections that is, to profit from experience, to learn , and since any one individual is unevenly endowed in the ability to form connections of different types, tests of intelligence-in-general may miss certain aptitudes useful for vocational counseling, hiring programs, or selection of employees for special training programs.

In Thorndike began devising tests for use in locating persons with clerical aptitudes and interests and thereby fathered personnel-selection psychology in business and industry. Many of Thorndike's writings, including Notes on Child Study , Principles of Teaching , Education: A First Book , and The Psychology of Arithmetic , dealt with both practical school problems and issues underlying education.

Thus, he investigated and wrote about the probable causes of differences in intellectual abilities, how habits are formed, the positive effects of practice, learning by rewards, the value of studying one subject for learning another, the arrangement of skills, and the effects upon students of tiredness and time of day. To satisfy education's desires for precise measures of students' aptitudes and achievements, Thorndike constructed numerous scales and tests.

Beginning with scales rating handwriting , English composition , and drawing , personnel selection tests for business, and psychological scaling for the U. Army during World War I, Thorndike next authored intelligence tests, college admissions tests, and an examination for law school students. As a scientist, Thorndike sought to develop a cohesive theory of human behavior. Through his work and theories, Thorndike became strongly associated with the American school of thought known as functionalism.

Thorndike is also often referred to as the father of modern-day educational psychology and published several books on the subject. Thorndike was elected president of the American Psychological Association in and became one of the very first psychologists to be admitted to the National Academy of Sciences in Today, Thorndike is perhaps best remembered for his famous animal experiments and for the law of effect. Ever wonder what your personality type means?

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Updated August 27, Nolan JL, ed. Updated June 16, Woodworth RS. Edward Lee Thorndike: A biographical memoir. Washington D. Your Privacy Rights. To change or withdraw your consent choices for VerywellMind.