Lee Joseph Cronbach (April 22, 1916 – October 1, 2001) 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 (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). 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." A
Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Cronbach as the 48th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.