page_title: Cyril Burt
section_title: Work in educational psychology
hierarchical_section_title: Cyril Burt / Work in educational psychology
caption_attribution_description: English: "Mr. Cyril Burt, Psychologist to the London County Council, measuring the speed of the thought of a child with a chronoscope to two-hundredths of a second."
context_page_description: Sir Cyril Lodowic Burt, FBA was an English educational psychologist and geneticist who also made contributions to statistics. He is known for his studies on the heritability of IQ. Shortly after he died, his studies of inheritance of intelligence were discredited after evidence emerged indicating he had falsified research data, inventing correlations in separated twins which did not exist.
context_section_description: In 1908, Burt took up the post of Lecturer in Psychology and Assistant Lecturer in Physiology at Liverpool University, where he was to work under the famed physiologist Sir Charles Sherrington. In 1909 Burt made use of Charles Spearman's model of general intelligence to analyse his data on the performance of schoolchildren in a battery of tests. This first research project was to define Burt's life's work in quantitative intelligence testing, eugenics, and the inheritance of intelligence. One of the conclusions in his 1909 paper was that upper-class children in private preparatory schools did better in the tests than those in the ordinary elementary schools, and that the difference was innate.
  In 1913, Burt took the part-time position of a school psychologist for the London County Council (LCC), with the responsibility of picking out the "feeble-minded" children, in accordance with the Mental Deficiency Act of 1913. He notably established that girls were equal to boys in general intelligence. The post also allowed him to work in Spearman's laboratory, and receive research assistants from the National Institute of Industrial Psychology, including Winifred Raphael.
  Burt was much involved in the initiation of child guidance in Great Britain and his 1925 publication The Young Delinquent led to opening of the London Child Guidance Clinic in Islington in 1927. In 1924 Burt was also appointed part-time professor of educational psychology at the London Day Training College (LDTC), and carried out much of his child guidance work on the premises.
caption: Burt (at the time psychologist to the London County Council) measuring the speed of the thought of a child with a chronoscope
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