During the GDR, pedagogical psychology was established through the intersections with its neighbouring disciplines of clinical psychology and medicine. In the 1950s, physiological findings by the Soviet physician Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936) initially provided the primarily medical-biological content for the first major science-political offensive by GDR science to develop these findings according to the Soviet model (Busse, 1998, p. 166). The young psychological science of the GDR was confronted with these demands, for example from the working group for pedagogical psychology at the German Central Pedagogical Institute (Deutsches Pädagogisches Zentralinstut, DPZI). There, it was hoped that the application of Pavlov’s reflex theory would help develop objective methods for investigating the realities of education (Zabel, 2009, p. 149). After Stalin's death in 1953, the ban on pedology that had been passed in the USSR in 1936 by party decision was lifted and expanded the repertoire of research methods applicable in socialist pedagogy in the GDR to include psychological testing procedures (see Shibanova-Harris, 2022). The Soviet-inspired search within the GDR for suitable objective methods for the pedagogical research subjects of teacher training, lesson planning, ability and school transition assessment consequently led to the use of standardised psychological research methods (including experiments and observation methods). It was primarily pedagogical questions that were to be investigated with the help of psychological research. Corresponding demands were made at the 6th Pedagogical Congress in 1961 in favour of increasing the importance of this research.

During polytechnicisation efforts (see also polytechnical education, polytechnical secondary school), towards the end of the 1950s, interest in education policy became more clearly focused on value creation from productive forces, so that the Society for Psychology in the GDR, newly founded in 1962, held its first congress under the title “Psychology as a socially productive force”.

Despite all this, psychological theory was not often applied in the last two decades of the GDR and was instead heavily used for legitimising practical education. Assessments motivated by school policy (Kossakowski & Kühn, 2010; Malycha, 2008, p. 231ff.; 248ff.) meant that key research results from the Institute for Educational Psychology at the Academy of Educational Sciences (Institut für Pädagogische Psychologie der Akademie für Pädagogische Wissenschaften, APW) were only accessible through in-house media and not generally in book form.

Otherwise, psychological science successfully endeavoured to establish itself as an independent subject in higher education and to reform respective curricula. Until 1970, there were four universities in the GDR that offered higher education leading to a diploma in psychology. At the University of Leipzig, scientific psychology was devoted in particular to teacher training and operated under staff shortages and ongoing efforts to reform the course of study (Schönpflug & Lüer, 2011, p. 301). In the end, a total of 4,000 scientists from socialist and non-socialist countries took part in the prestigious "XXII International Congress for Psychology" of the Society for Psychology (Gesellschaft für Psychologie) in Leipzig in 1980 (cf. ibid.).