Leta stetter hollingworth biography

When Leta attempted to obtain a teaching position, she learned that New York City's school district would not hire married women as teachers. This left her unemployed and fueled her interest and activism in women's issues. After helping Harry, now an instructor at Barnard College, with some research for Coca-Cola on the effects of caffeine on mental and motor functions, Leta took courses at Columbia Teachers College.

She later developed a great interest in those of the highest IQ, the giftedpioneering educational programs for such children. Hollingworth also pioneered empirical research into the psychology of women, dispelling myths of the inferiority of women and their psychological impairment during the menstrual cycle. Her work in this area was incomplete, and in fact the questions she raised regarding how women can best fulfill their maternal role in the family and use their talents and abilities to serve society have yet to be answered.

Two more daughters, Ruth Elinor and Margaret Carley, were born in quick succession, her mother dying after the birth of Margaret. For ten years, Leta and her sisters were raised by their grandparents, their father having left upon the death of his wife. When Leta was 12, her father remarried and she and her sisters moved to Valentine, Nebraska, where they suffered under an alcoholic and ofter absent father and a resentful stepmother.

Leta found comfort in writing poetry and her journal. Her mother had written a detailed biography of Leta's infancy, and this, combined with her father's skill at story-telling, encouraged Leta that she should become a writer. She published her first poem at age 14, in the local newspaper. Inshe graduated from Valentine High School and at the age of 16 entered the University of Nebraska where she pursued her passion for creative writing.

She met Harry Levi Hollingworth, also a student there, and they became engaged. When Harry graduated and moved to New York City to do graduate work at Columbia Universityshe remained in Nebraska to complete her undergraduate studies. After graduating inshe hoped to pursue a writing career, but financial considerations led her to take a teaching job in her home state.

When Harry obtained a position as an assistant professor, she moved to New York to join him and they were married on December 31, Once married, Leta Hollingworth was unable to gain employment because married women were not hired as teachers in New York City. 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 leta stetter hollingworth biography 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 leta stetter hollingworth biographies 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 husband 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. 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. Thorndike greatly influenced the work of Leta Hollingworth as he was a supporter of the variability hypothesis.

The variability hypothesis postulated that, because men exhibit a greater variation in both psychological and physical traits than women, women were destined for mediocrity while men both occupied the highest and lowest ends of the range on any given trait Shields Hollingworth set out to prove that the variability hypothesis was incorrect and that the extremes were not based on a male genetic superiority, instead extremes were culturally-based.

She believed that rather than innate differences, societal roles accounted for the sex differences in the numbers of institutionalized males and females at the Clearing House for Mental Defectives. Although the research of Hollingworth conflicted with the direct interests of Thorndike, she completed her doctorate dissertation beneath his supervision.

Her dissertation addressed the previously supported concept of women's mental incapacity during their monthly menstruations. For the study, she recorded the results of both women's and men's performances on a variety of cognitive, perceptual, and motor tasks daily for three months. No empirical evidence of a decreased performance with a phase of the menstrual cycle was found.

Upon receiving her Ph. In order to test the hypothesis that women were significantly impaired during their menstrual cycle, she tested twenty-three females and two males as controls by giving them tasks, which involved perceptual and motor skills and mental abilities over a three-month period. She concluded that her data did, "not reveal a periodic mental or motor inefficiency in normal women.

Hollingworth was also interested in challenging the widely accepted belief that intelligence is widely inherited and that women were intellectually inferior to men. She believed that women do not reach positions of prominence due to the social roles that are assigned to them, not because they are intellectually inferior to men. An assertion held at the time was that there was greater variability among men while women were less variable.

Hollingworth referred to this variability hypothesis as "armchair dogma" which she characterized as the "literature of opinion". This differs, she maintained, from the "literature of fact" which has been carefully obtained through controlled scientific data because it is merely statements made by scientific men not based on experimental evidence.

Leta stetter hollingworth biography

It is a problem that has never confronted me. These environmental conditions would provide the adult male with many more opportunities to be more variable than females. Men had a wide range of professions from which to choose that would improve the talents they possessed. Women, on the other hand, had been confined to only one profession, housekeeping, which did not provide them the chance to prove their intelligence.

Thus, their natural variability would be impaired. Hollingworth and Helen Montague collected data on 1, consecutively born males and 1, consecutively born females in the New York Infirmary for Women and Children. They took ten anatomical measurements on each infant and found that on the whole the male infants were slightly larger than the females, but there were no differences in variability between the sexes.

Hollingworth believed that she was mostly responsible for Thorndike's revised beliefs on the importance of nurture over nature. Leta Hollingworth died on November 27,at the age of 53 of abdominal cancer at the Columbia University Medical Center in Manhattan. Hollingsworth's contributions to eugenics in American education were pivotal to the foundation and dissemination of gifted and talented programs.

She is known for her dedication to her research participants. She stressed the importance of direct contact with her participants, even when her peers in the testing profession did not. She famously said, "The adding machine has tremendous advantages over the child as an object of intimate association. It has no parents; it does not lose its pocket-handkerchief; it does not kick or yell.

All this we grant. Those who really study children — those who would study any individuals— must be prepared to take pains". Due to her pioneering role in the study of the psychology of gifted children, in the high-IQ society Intertel instituted an annual award named in her honor for excellence in research in education and psychology of the gifted.

Additional co-sponsorship by the National Association for Gifted Children was obtained since the late 90s, to which the leta stetter hollingworth biography had been turned over circaand which has continued awarding it yearly since. American Psychologist, 30 8— Hollingworth departed from this stance, suggesting it was important to create a curriculum designed to foster the specific needs of gifted children.

Hollingworth wrote the first comprehensive book about gifted children as well as taught the very first college course on giftedness. Hollingsworth's studies of gifted children coincided with Lewis Terman's famous study of highly intelligent people. The two thinkers never actually met, but they purportedly held each other's work in high esteem.

One of the major differences between their approaches was that, while Terman believed that intelligence was largely genetic, Hollingworth was more focused on the environmental and educational factors that contributed to intelligence. Through her work, Leta Stetter Hollingworth left a major mark on the field of psychology. Some of her most frequently cited publications include:.

Hollingworth, L. Variability as related to sex differences in achievement. American Journal of Sociology, 19, Sex differences in mental traits. Psychological Bulletin, 13, The new woman in the making. Current History, 27, The psychology of the adolescent. New York: D. Appleton and Company. Leta Stetter Hollingworth pioneered the psychological study of women, and her work helped to dispel a number of myths that were often used to argue against women's rights.

As a psychology professor, she also mentored a number of students who went on to become important psychologists, including Florence Goodenough.