Cyril Hoyt

Cyril J. Hoyt (November 22, 1905--December 16, 1979), the author of Hoyt's coefficient of reliability, was a long-time member of the University of Minnesota Department of Educational Psychology. His interest in the theory and practice of Education had its roots in his teaching of mathematics and science for Minot Public Schools from 1928 to 1937. He became intensely involved in Educational Research while pursuing higher degrees at the University of Minnesota. Quiet, absorbed in abstract thought during his lectures on the theory of measurement and the theory of scaling, he was self-effacing to the degree that he never mentioned in class his major contribution to psychometrics (Hoyt, 1941), leaving that to others. His modesty is perhaps one of the reasons that the generalization of the Kuder-Richardson's (1937) formulation of the coefficient of internal consistency reliability to a continuous case is generally ascribed to Lee Cronbach (1951), even though Hoyt had already made this generalization a decade earlier (Hoyt, 1941). Professor Hoyt retired in 1974.