Cronbach, Lee J. 1916-2001

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