Testing to Establish Standards. Returning in 1890 from visits to European schools and psychological laboratories, the reformer Joseph Mayer Rice began 2 years later to investigate the public school systems of various large cities in the United States. He was appalled by the rigid, mechanical, dehumanizing of instruction, by the harshness of manner he saw among the teachers, and by the passive responses from the students. When the muckraking articles he wrote failed to ignite the fires of reform, he decided to gather some data to support his claims. As an editor of the Forum in charge of its department of educational research, he undertook an investigation into arithmetic that was one of the first attempts at using empirical data to attack an educational problem. As Rice (1902) saw it, “the elementary schools had been conducted altogether on lines dictated by theories,… the ways and means of different schools had varied in accordance with different theories, and no attempt had been made to discover the comparative value of different processes by comparing the results”(p.281).