Lee Cronbach | |
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Born | April 22, 1916 Fresno, California, United States |
Died | October 1, 2001 Palo Alto, California, United States |
(aged 85)
Nationality | United States |
Fields | Psychology, Educational Psychology |
Known for | Cronbach's Alpha, The Generalizability Theory |
Lee Joseph Cronbach (April 22, 1916 – October 1, 2001) was an American educational psychologist who made contributions to psychological testing and measurement. At the University of Illinois, Urbana, Cronbach produced many of his works: the "Alpha" paper (Cronbach, 1951), as well as an essay titled The Two Disciplines of Scientific Psychology, in the American Psychologist magazine in 1957, where he discussed his thoughts on the increasing divergence between the fields of experimental psychology and correlational psychology (to which he himself belonged).
Cronbach was the president of the American Psychological Association, president of the American Educational Research Association, Vida Jacks Professor of Education at Stanford University and a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences. Cronbach is considered to be "one of the most prominent and influential educational psychologists of all time." A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Cronbach as the 48th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
Born in Fresno, California, Cronbach was selected as a child to participate in Lewis Terman's long-term study of talented children. He received a bachelor's degree from Fresno State College and a master's degree from the University of California, Berkeley. Cronbach had an interest in educational and psychological measurement due to Thurstone’s work on the measurement of attitudes. This work of Thurstone intrigued Cronbach; motivating him to complete and receive his doctorate in educational psychology from the University of Chicago in 1940.