Shen Deli

Introduction

Shen Deli (沈德立, 1934–2013) put the Chinese child into the Chinese psychology laboratory. A Changsha-born educator who trained in Tianjin and took advanced study in experimental psychology at Peking University, he spent his career at Tianjin Normal University arguing — against the habit of importing Western child studies wholesale — that children's attention, memory and learning should be measured experimentally, in Chinese classrooms, with Chinese instruments. His co-authored textbook Basic Psychology (《基础心理学》, 1987, with Zhang Shuzu) was written explicitly to end Chinese psychology's dependence on translated teaching materials; his Institute of Psychology and Behavior at Tianjin Normal became a Ministry of Education key research base; and his students carried experimental child psychology across northern China. He served as vice president of the university and of the Chinese Psychological Society, and received the Society's Lifetime Achievement Award.

Early Life and Education

Shen was born on March 23, 1934, in Changsha, Hunan. He graduated in 1956 from the education department of Hebei Tianjin Normal College — the predecessor institution of the university he would spend his life building — and completed advanced study in experimental psychology at Peking University in 1961, in the generation trained between the discipline's founding and its near-destruction.

Academic and Professional Career

He rose through Tianjin Normal University as professor and doctoral supervisor, served as its vice president, and founded and led its Academy of Psychology and Behavior, a Ministry of Education key research base for the humanities and social sciences, while editing the base's journal Studies of Psychology and Behavior. Within the discipline he served as vice president of the Chinese Psychological Society, convener of the psychology panel of the State Council's Academic Degrees Committee, and a member of the Ministry of Education's social science committee. He died on March 13, 2013, in Tianjin, aged seventy-nine.

Major Contributions to Psychology

Experimental child psychology

Shen's research program — attention, memory and the efficient-learning studies of his later years — insisted that claims about Chinese children rest on experiments run with Chinese participants, instruments normed for them, and controls that classroom reality demands. In the lineage of Chen Li's industrial laboratory work and Lin Chongde's classroom experiments, this was the northern Chinese branch of putting psychology into schools.

A discipline's materials

Basic Psychology (1987) and the research instruments his institute developed gave Chinese teachers and researchers their own tools, ending the era in which every Chinese psychology course was, in effect, a course about someone else's participants — the same indigenizing instinct that animated Yang Kuo-shu's movement, pursued through the laboratory rather than the theory seminar.