  Educational psychology traces its origins to the experimental
and empirical work on association and sensory activity by the
English scientist and founder of eugenics, anthropologist Sir
Francis Galton (1822–1911), and the American psychologist G.
Stanley Hall (1844–1924), who wrote The Contents of Children’s
Minds (1883). The major leader in the field of educational
psychology, however, was the American educator and psychologist
Edward Lee Thorndike (1874–1949), who designed methods to
measure and test children’s intelligence and their ability to
learn. Thorndike proposed the transfer-of-training theory, which
states that “what is learned in one sphere of activity
‘transfers’ to another sphere only when the two spheres share
common ‘elements.’ ”