Lee Cronbach

Lee J. Cronbach (1916 - 2001) was an American educational psychologist who made significant contributions to psychological testing and measurement. Born in Fresno, California (U.S. state), Cronbach received a bachelor's degree from Fresno State College and a master's degree from the University of California, Berkeley. In 1940, he received a doctorate in educational psychology from the University of Chicago. 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 in 1957, president of the American Educational Research Association (1964-65), and Vida Jacks Professor of Education at Stanford University.

Cronbach is most famous for the development of Cronbach's alpha, a method for determining the reliability of educational and psychological tests. His work on test reliability reached an acme with the creation of generalizability theory, a statistical model for identifying and quantifying the sources of measurement error.