EARLI developed from a small group of researchers gathering occasionaly to a professional organisation. Professors such as Heinz Mandl, Erik De Corte, Erno Lehtinen, Neville Bennett, Pierro Boscolo, and many others met in the US at the AERA meetings. During these meetings, the first ideas were created to start a European platform. In december 1983 Prof. Erik De Corte and Prof. Dick Snow, came up with the idea to organize an invited conference with the goal to found a European association for researchers. In the mean time, in the Netherlands, Prof. Robert-Jan Simons and Hans Lodewijks had the idea to found a European journal for educational research and made contacts in different countries. Shortly after, these four people met and decided to go for the invited conference and to leave the idea of the journal for some time. Different people who were already known in the field of Learning and Instruction were contacted to participate in the conference. Two sponsors financed this startup, the Office of Naval Research and SVO (the Dutch society for educational research) ran by Chris Van Seventer.
In June1985, the first EARLI conference was held in Leuven, Belgium, to which a number of well known American Scholars were invited, such as the late Dick Snow, Robert Glaser, Lauren Resnick and Bill Mc Keachie. In this first EARLI conference, 140 people were invited. At the end of the first conference, EARLI was founded. The first Executive Committee was led by Noel Entwistle, Heinz Mandl, Hans Lodewijks (secretary), Erik De Corte (President), Clotilde Pontecorvo, and Michel Gilly.
Pretty soon after the founding of EARLI, the idea of the journal came up again. In this respect, there was contact with Pergamon Press. In 1989, concrete steps were taken to start the first official journal of EARLI "Learning & Instruction". In 1989 Erik De Corte's term as President was ending, and during a meeting of the Executive Committee in Rome he accepted to act as the first Editor of L&I, with Lieven Verschaffel as editorial assistant. The first issue of L&I appeared in 1991.
Today, 11 presidents and 11 EC's have led the association (Presidents: De Corte, Entwistle, Mandl, Simons, Vosniadou, Bennett, Boekaerts, Lehtinen, Dochy, Säljö and Boscolo) and many Special Interest Group coordinators have contributed to the development of EARLI.
During the term of Prof. Bennett as president, it was decided to start with a permanent office in 1997. Neville Bennett and Rupert Wegerif surely can be called the architects of this permanent office where currently four people are appointed. The office is located in Leuven, which is close to Brussels in order to enhance EU contacts.
In order to stimulate the professional development of JUnior educational REsearchers, EARLI established a network for Junior Researchers (JURE) in 1999. In close cooperation with EARLI, the JURE members organise yearly scientific events.
After two decades Learning & Instruction is Europe's strongest journal in Educational Research (it's impact factor raised to 1.029). This overwhelming success of L&I and the occasion of the 20th anniversary of EARLI led to several new initiatives since 2005: a new journal for EARLI called ‘Educational Research Review', a new award for young and promising scholars, position papers, Advanced Study Colloquia and the foundation of a sister association, EAPRIL (European Association for Practitioner Research on Improving Learning).
Many conference presidents, conference managers and local organising teams have invested a lot of time in organising our EARLI biennial conferences. Some of these conferences turned out to be a huge success, such as the recent ones organised by Bjorn Hasselgren in Gothenburg, Frits Oser/Ulli Baetz in Fribourg and Pierro Boscolo/ Lucia Mason in Padova, Andreas Demetriou/Costas Constantinou in Nicosia, Benö Csapó/Csaba Csíkos in Budapest and Jos Beishuizen and Gert Rijlaarsdam continued the tradition of excellent conferences in Amsterdam 2009.
The continuous development of EARLI is well mirrored in the growth of membership over the years (400 members in 1991; 1000 in 1999; 1200 in 2001; 1400 in 2003; 1800 in 2005); over 2000 in 2007) and the increasing activities.
EARLI celebrates its 25th anniversary this year.