Edward Thorndike (1874-1949)

Professional Life
Edward Thorndike was born in 1874 in Williamsburg, Massachusetts. He was educated at several schools, including The Roxbury Latin School, Wesleyan University, Harvard and Columbia University. Thorndike began his professional career at the College for Women of Case Western Reserve in Cleveland, Ohio, but quickly left to assume a teaching position at Teachers College at Columbia. Thorndike remained in that position until his retirement, focusing on education, learning, and mental evaluations. Thorndike also held the position of President of the Psychometric Society, after the first president and founder Louis Leon Thurstone, stepped down. Thorndike sat on the board of the Psychological Corporation and acted as President of the American Psychological Association for a term.

Contribution to Psychology
Thorndike is widely known for his development of the law of effect. Trying to dispel people’s beliefs that animals used problem solving abilities such as insight, he conducted a series of experiments involving cats and puzzle boxes. He implemented a curve to reveal that cats used gradual learning techniques rather than insight. He did agree that the cats escaped through a process of trial and error, thus increasing their ability and decreasing the time it took to escape with each attempt. B.F. Skinner continued this idea in his theory of operant conditioning. The analysis was used in behavioral work for decades, and has been renamed connectionist. It ultimately became a fundamental educational requirement.

Thorndike identified three specific factors that benefit learning and result in maximum outcomes:

1) The law of effect is determined by consequence,

2) The law of recency requires that recurrence is determined by the most recent response,

3) The law of exercise states that when a stimulus is administered upon response, each subsequent response is strengthened.

Thorndike developed military tests while enrolled in the Army. His Alpha and Beta tests were used to determine classifications of soldiers. These tests directly impacted the development of future psychology in the area of education.

Thorndike was an innovator in the area of active learning and believed that children were quite capable of learning without the instruction of a teacher. He had a basic theory of learning that stated that the root of learning is trial and error. He believed that learning is achieved in increments and is not determined by ideas. He also believed that all mammals, humans or not, learned in the same way. Thorndike created books to help teachers instruct students in reading. Each of his three books was published ten years apart and greatly influenced the way children learned to read and write.