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Abstract
The case of Edward Lee Thorndike has posed a historical riddle for mathematics educators. This riddle emerged as American education was modernized through psychology during the beginning of the twentieth century. Thorndike was central to this modernization. He founded educational psychology and used his disciplinary background to take an active part in mathematics curriculum reform. His theories and methods brought him recognition as a founder within the emergent field of mathematics education, but they also distinguished him as a foreigner due to his apparent emphasis on behavioral psychology and educational measurement. The founder-foreigner paradox, then, is the riddle by which a single man was simultaneously so central and yet so peripheral to mathematics educators’ emerging professional community. To explore this paradox, I follow Thorndike’s path from his first experiments in animal intelligence to his comprehensive program for mathematics curriculum reform. I describe the educational psychology that Thorndike developed to put curriculum planning and educational decision making on a firmer scientific basis. I analyze the links between Thorndike’s educational psychology and his mathematics pedagogy. I identify the educational products Thorndike contributed to mathematics teaching and learning, and I discuss the principles he developed for mathematics curriculum design. I situate his work and his contributions in the larger history of progressive education reform.
Prior interpretations by educational historians and mathematics educators have described Thorndike as emphasizing stimulus-response learning, drill on independent skills, social efficiency, and intelligence testing and other educational measurements. Evidence from my study revealed that Thorndike held a much broader, progressive outlook. He attended carefully to consciousness alongside behavior, reasoning and problem solving alongside habits, subject matter alongside student psychology, and democracy alongside industry as touchstones of curriculum aims. Thorndike embraced the inclusive and plural character of fundamental education science, and his ultimate goal was to use science to improve human welfare. These findings bring additional insight into the founder-foreigner paradox and the larger trajectory of curriculum reform in mathematics education during the twentieth century.