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Lee Joseph Cronbach was an American educational psychologist who made contributions to psychological testing and measurement. 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. In 1948, 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. After teaching mathematics and chemistry at Fresno High School, Cronbach took faculty positions at the State College of Washington, the University of Chicago, and the University of Illinois, finally settling at Stanford University in 1964. 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."
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