Cyril Hoyt

Cyril Hoyt, the author of Hoyt's coefficient of reliability, was a long-time member of the University of Minnesota Department of Educational Psychology. Quiet, absorbed in abstract thought during his lectures on the theory of measurement and the theory of scaling, 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 and his Cronbach's alpha (1951), even though this generalization was already made a decade earlier (Hoyt, 1941).

Professor Hoyt retired in 1974.

References (in chronological order)

 * Kuder, G. & Richardson, M. (1937). The theory of estimation of test reliability. Psychometrika, 2, 151-160.
 * Hoyt, C. (1941). Test reliability estimated by analysis of variance. Psychometrika, 6, 153-160
 * Cronbach, L. J. (1951). Coefficient alpha and the internal structure of tests. Psychometrika, 16, 297-333.