ABSTRACT
Educational psychology has been characterized as a discipline in the "middle," as building bridges between the science of psychology and the art of education (Bagley, Bell, Seashore, & Whipple, 1910; Grinder, 1978). To the extent that that is true, its history is so bound up with both education and psychology that it is difficult to describe it as beginning with a specific event, because there were educational theories evolving, in some modern sense, over the past 200 years, while psychology was also evolving from its earlier ties with philosophy to become established as experimental psychology in the late 19th century. For an excellent single-chapter summary of the background of educational psychology, see Charles (1987). The edited volume in which this appears is devoted to various aspects of the history of educational psychology, including the subfields of education and psychology upon which educational psychology is in some respects derivative (Glover & Ronning, 1987). Another edited volume contains some historical material (Wittrock & Farley, 1989). The influence of James, Hall, Dewey and Thorndike on contemporary educational psychology is provided in Berliner (1993).
