

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.’ ”