18 Facts About Lee Cronbach

Lee Joseph Cronbach 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, 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.

Lee 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, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.

Lee Cronbach graduated from Fresno High School at age 14, but as the family could not afford to send him to University, he graduated from Fresno State College to become a teacher.

Lee Cronbach received a bachelor's degree in chemistry and mathematics and later a master's degree from the University of California, Berkeley.

Lee Cronbach had an interest in educational and psychological measurement due to Thurstone's work on the measurement of attitudes.

Lee Cronbach was able to sharpen the sensitivity of educational research, such as how different learners cope with the demands within different learning environments.

Lee Cronbach advocated the use of extensive local studies and field methods, producing useful narratives of teaching and learning.

Lee Cronbach's contributions include refining research questions which seek to understand the person-situation interactions in educational settings, recognizing the abandonment of strict scientism is in favour of a more pluralistic philosophical and empirical agenda, and emphasizing that the role of context is just as essential as improved interpretations of educational processes.

Lee Cronbach developed a framework for evaluation design, implementation and analysis.

Lee Cronbach believed that the purpose of evaluation to provide constructive feedback for program implementers and clients was incorrect.

Lee Cronbach has proven that research is valuable - to the extent where research serves the purpose of improving some aspect of social reality.

Lee Cronbach worked on the concept of reliability which had a huge impact on the field of educational measurement.

Lee Cronbach had created this formula which could be applied throughout a variety of tests and other measurement instruments - gaining an enormous amount of popularity among practitioners.

Lee Cronbach's alpha provided a measure of reliability from a single test administration thus showing that on repeated occasions, or even other parallel forms of testing, were not needed to estimate a test's consistency.

Lee Cronbach began his work with the aim to produce a handbook on measurement - allowing people to apply mathematical concepts to transform one's behaviours and events into quantitative results.

Lee Cronbach believed that there were two flaws in the concept of taking observed test scores into true score and error components: he believed that true scores were "ill-defined" and errors were "all-inclusive".

The Generalizability theory expanded when Lee Cronbach became concerned that an undifferentiated error term covered up information about systematic variations which could be important in terms of test performance.