The school was founded by its leader Alexander Luria, who—along with Mark Lebedinsky and Alexei Leontev—moved from Moscow to Kharkiv, the capital of Soviet Ukraine until 1934.
In the postwar period, the scientific work of the school developed under informal leadership of Pyotr Zinchenko in the field of the psychology of memory.
The major achievement of the school is the systematic analysis of the phenomenon of involuntary memory from the standpoint of the activity approach in psychology.
The information processing or engineering psychology approach to memory and cognition was developed in the research by Zinchenko, Bocharova, Nevel'skii, Repkina.
Another major area of research is the theory and practice of developmental teaching (or the system of El'konin-Davydov) associated with such representatives of the Kharkiv school as Repkin, Bodanskii, Dusavitskii.