ABSTRACT
Sir Cyril Burt was the first foreigner to be awarded the Thorndike Award by the American Psychological Association. Cyril Burt was the son of a doctor. Burt gained first-hand experience of the problems of living and being educated in a slum area. Burt was an applied psychologist who spent about half of his working life on practical issues. He had considerable skill in handling both practical and political realities, and was able to push psychology to the forefront of decision-making in important fields – education, vocational guidance and criminology. Burt was the first person in Britain to collect data systematically via interviews and assessment in order to study delinquency. Burt set out the principles for, and was instrumental in the establishment of Child Guidance Clinics in the UK in 1927; he also established a special school for the handicapped. Burt made significant contributions to psychometrics – which sets out to determine the 'mental characters of individuals' experimentally.
