Leta stetter hollingworth psychology

Once married, Leta Hollingworth was unable to gain employment because married women were not hired as teachers in New York City.

Leta stetter hollingworth psychology: She became increasingly interested in

This left her frustrated at her inability to be more than a housewife and questioning the role of women in society Shields Eventually, the Hollingworths were able to save enough money to allow Leta to attend graduate school, and inshe began graduate work in educational psychology at Columbia under the supervision of Edward Lee Thorndike.

There she pursued her interest in the psychology of women while developing from Thorndike new interests in intelligence and giftedness. Although her numerous publications moved away from this area into educational psychology, particularly as it related to the instruction of mentally challenged and gifted children, Hollingworth planned for years to write a book on the psychology of women for which she had chosen the title, Mrs.

She was, however, active in women's suffrage and a member of the Women's Suffrage Party Benjamin Hollingworth is best known for her work on gifted children, her publication, Gifted Children, being the standard reference in the field for many years. Her longitudinal study of children with exceptionally high IQbegun in and completed by her leta stetter hollingworth psychology and published inas Children above IQ, remains as the most comprehensive study of children in this range of intelligence.

Stanley Hall 's as the standard text in the field. Hollingworth held a teaching position in the Education Department at Columbia University frombecoming a full professor in She also served as editor of The Journal of Genetic Psychology. Leta Hollingworth died of abdominal cancer on November 27,aged Embarking on a career in psychology since she was unable to obtain a position as a teacher due to her status as a married woman, Leta Hollingworth was initially most interested in issues relating to the psychology of women.

She recognized that the literature of her day regarding women was largely non-scientific, although it was often presented as if it were. Hollingworth realized that it was important to distinguish between what she referred to as "the literature of opinion," namely "all written statements, made by scientific men and others, not based on experimental evidence," and the "the literature of fact," which is "based on experimental data, which have been obtained under carefully controlled conditions, and which may be verified by anyone competent to understand and criticize them" Hollingworth Her work, beginning with an investigation of the claims of female inferiority, greatly contributed to the "literature of fact.

Having experienced impediments to personal achievements as a result of her gender, Hollingworth set out to empirically investigate the factors that were thought to make women inferior to men. Her doctoral dissertation, supervised by Edward Lee Thorndikeinvestigated the commonly held idea of "functional periodicity," namely that women suffer psychological impairment at certain phases of their menstrual cycle.

She tested women, and two men as "controls," on a variety of perceptual and motor tasks over a period of three months. Her data revealed no cyclical differences in performance, refuting the idea Hollingworth [] Continuing her work in this area, Hollingworth challenged the "variability hypothesis," an element of the Social Darwinism of the period and the basis for many claims of female inferiority.

Following Charles Darwin 's emphasis on the importance of variation from the average for the evolutionary process, the variability hypothesis suggested that men are inherently more variable in their physical and mental abilities, men providing the progressive element and spurring further evolution. Thus, men were thought to vary greatly in their abilities, while women were assumed to be basically the same in their abilities, with the distribution of women being "represented by a narrower bell-shaped curve" Shields Hollingworth HL.

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Leta stetter hollingworth psychology: Leta Stetter Hollingworth was an

Was this page helpful? Thanks for your feedback! What is your feedback? The patent fact that in the leta stetter hollingworth psychology achievements of the world in science, art, invention, and management, women have been far excelled by men…. In particular, if men differin intelligence and energy by wider degrees than do women, eminence in and leadership of the world's affairs of whatever sort will inevitably belong oftener to men.

They will oftener deserve it. Thorndike's work, and the work of others like him, was based on that of Charles Darwin. Darwin argued that male intelligence varied more widely than female intelligence. Thus, men were more likely to be either intellectually gifted or defective, while females were inherently less variable, and therefore intellectually mediocre.

While the intellectual life of men was dominated by high levels of perception and reasoning, the mental universe of women was filled with emotions and sensory experiences. The emotional nature of women made them suited for domestic tasks and child care. In sum, the variability argument was based on social prejudice, rather than concrete scientific observation.

Such ideas were commonly asserted in the educational, psychological, medical, and sociological literature of the day. A lone voice in the wilderness was the British psychologist Karl Pearsonwho in published research refuting the variability theory. Until Leta Hollingworth's entry into the field, Pearson's work was the only scientific study to challenge conventional wisdom.

There she assisted with the mental testing program. Inher skill and expertise led to an offer of permanent employment with the newly created New York City Civil Service. As the first female psychologist hired by the city, she had the opportunity to put the variability argument to the test, while visiting schools, courts of law, and hospitals.

Hollingworth discovered that there was a variation in age between men and women who were admitted to mental institutions. She argued that social factors played an important role in the phenomena:. At present it suffices to point out that the fact that females escape the Clearing-House till beyond the age of thirty years three times as frequently as males, fits very well with the fact that more males than females are brought to the Clearing-House, on the whole.

The boy who cannot compete mentally is found out, becomes at an early age the object of concern to relatives, is brought to the Clearing-House, and directed towards an institution. The girl who cannot compete mentally is not so often recognized as definitely defective, since it is not unnatural for her to drop into the isolation of the home. Thus they survive outside the institutions.

As Hollingworth noted in a subsequent study: "A girl must be relatively more stupid than a boy in order to be presented for examination and she must be still more stupid, comparatively, to be actually segregated as unfit for social and economic participation. InHollingworth began to use infants as a case study, since she argued they were relatively free from the environmental factors which might account for variability in children and adults.

She explained the variation of female and males by the differing social and economic roles which the two sexes played in contemporary society. As she pointed out:.

Leta stetter hollingworth psychology: She made contributions in

A woman of natural herculean strength does not wash dishes, cook meals, or rear children much more successfully than a woman of ordinary muscle. But a man of natural herculean strength is free to abandon carpentry or agriculture and become a prize-fighter or a blacksmith, thus exercising and enhancing his native equipment. Hollingworth employed the files of the New York Infirmary for Women and Children to collect her data.

Each infant born had its weight, circumference of shoulders, length, and cranial measurements recorded.

Leta stetter hollingworth psychology: Leta Hollingworth believed educational

In a survey of 2, infants, she concluded that while male babies were larger than females, there was no inherent leta stetter hollingworth psychology between the sexes. Her results challenged the variability thesis on a scientific basis. For several decades menstruation, and the behavioral changes associated with it, were used to characterize women as unstable.

Holling-worth planned a study of menstruation for her doctoral dissertation at Columbia University. Her supervisor was Edward L. She tested 23 females and two males for motor skills and mental tasks over a period of three months. Her results revealed that neither motor coordination nor mental ability were impaired by menstruation. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Hollingworth proved that women were neither unreliable or inefficient during menstruation.

Inalready the author of one book and numerous scientific articles on the psychology of women, Leta Hollingworth was awarded a Ph. In the same year, she published an article which explored the social control of women in child bearing and rearing. The article was prompted by the commonly held assumption that only abnormal women did not have children, and that normal women found ultimate fulfillment through child care.

Hollingworth surveyed the social-control mechanisms imposed by law, medicine, education, and public opinion which underpinned attitudes toward maternity:. It seems very clear that "the social guardians" have not really believed that maternal instinct is alone a sufficient guaranty of population. They have made use of all possible social devices to insure not only child-bearing, but child-rearing.

Belief, law, public opinion, illusion, education, art … have all been used to reenforce leta stetter hollingworth psychology instinct. We shall never know just how much maternal instinct alone will do for population until all the forces and influences exemplified above have become inoperative. She describes it as similar to the "physical weaning from infantile methods of taking food, it may be attended by emotional outbursts or depressions, which are likely to come upon people whenever habits have to be broken.

She even wrote her own textbooks for the classes she taught at Columbia. It was not until the s that she began to earnestly work with gifted children. Hollingworth believed that there were certain ways to nurture giftedness and educate gifted children. It also includes her attempt to create a curriculum to benefit young children with IQs over Proper resources and educational opportunities did not exist for them: the zeitgeist of the time was that, "the bright can take care of themselves.

They needed to be identified early in their lives as being gifted, as well as not kept isolated from other children and peers. Their needs were not being met by the average school systems, which needed to be addressed. Her first long-term study of the gifted began in in New York. Hollingworth used a group of fifty children, aged between seven and nine years old, who all had recorded IQs over They were studied over the course of three years, with two goals in mind.

The first was to gain a better understanding of as many aspects of these children as possible. This included information on their backgrounds, family life and circumstances, their psychological states and makeup, and also their physical, temperamental and social traits. The results of this study are published in her book Gifted Children She continued to stay in contact with the children long after the completion of the study.

During the eighteen years that followed she added information about the spouses and offspring of the original participants to the study and results. Another experiment with gifted children took place in Children with educational problems from the Speyer School were used in the study. The population was similar to her first study, yet special attention was paid to the racial mixture of the group.

It was modeled after typical New York public school demographics. The school became known as, "Leta Hollingworth's school for bright children," and received a great deal of public attention. Hollingworth had devised it. She discovered that the children wanted to explore the world around them. As a result, the curriculum consisted of learning about such things as food, clothing, shelter, transport, tools, time keeping and communication.

The children made work units which were made up of learning materials each student had provided. This model of learning proved to be more beneficial to the gifted youth than simply introducing them to advanced subjects that they would later encounter in higher levels of learning. Hollingworth's final study on gifted children was published after her death, by her husband in It was a longitudinal study of twelve children with IQs higher than She witnessed a child scorewhich prompted her to seek out eleven other children with similar capabilities.

The twenty three years following that initial inspiration were spent finding the children and attempting an in-depth study. Fully aware that she would never live long enough to see all of the children into their adulthood, Hollingworth meticulously attempted to build a framework upon which future research findings could be accomplished. She noted that individuals "who test above IQ S-B ," i.

They seldom volunteer information about themselves. They do not like to have attention being called to their families and homes. She laid the foundations for future studies of gifted children with this work. Adults would often ignore such children because they were thought to be self-sufficient. Myths that exceptional children were clumsy, fragile and eccentric were dismissed by the findings as well.

Hollingworth had many accomplishments with working with gifted individuals. She was the first to write a comprehensive book on them, as well as teach a college course about gifted children. She was the first to study children with intelligence quotients IQ above with her longitudinal study. Hollingworth continued to research proper methods to educate gifted children and advocated for multiple criteria in identifying the gifted.

She published over 30 studies on the gifted and pioneered research and development in naturalistic settings. She also developed child-center therapy and trained Carl Rogers. Hollingworth's publications were systematically presented in The Psychology of Subnormal Children and in Special Talents and Defects Poffenberger Forty-five out of the seventy-five articles published by Hollingworth were about the subject of the superior child Poffenberger Even throughout her work with gifted children, Hollingworth was conscientious about considering her results in a social context.

She concludes her article "Vocabulary as a Symptom of Intellect" by stating: "A summary of present knowledge, derived from experimentation, would therefore state that an individual's vocabulary is one of the most significant symptoms of his 'inherent power to learn how to accomplish or how to obtain what she wants. It is noteworthy that she considered the implications of her findings in a perspective larger than a psychological article.

While studying at Colombia, Leta Stetter Hollingworth became interested in the misconceptions about women that seemed to be a part of the zeitgeist. Thorndike agreed to supervise her dissertation on functional periodicitywhich focused on the idea that women are psychologically impaired during menstruation.