Leta Stetter Hollingworth
Encyclopedia
Leta Hollingworth was a psychologist who conducted pioneering work on the psychology of women as well as on the education of exceptional children.
near the town of Chadron
to Margaret Elinor Danley and John G. Stetter. When her mother died after giving birth to her third child, Hollingworth’s father remarried and moved the children to Valentine, Nebraska
to live with him and their stepmother. Hollingworth described the experience of living there as a "fiery furnace" due, in part, to the alcoholism that plagued the household. She was able to escape in 1902 when she graduated from Valentine High School.
When she was only 16 years old, she enrolled at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln where she blossomed academically. During her time at the University of Nebraska, she met and became engaged to Henry Hollingworth. He went onto move to New York to do graduate work at Columbia University. Stetter stayed behind in Nebraska to finish her undergraduate studies. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree in 1906, along with a State Teacher's Certificate. This qualified her to teach English Language and Literature in any Nebraska public high school.
She started her professional career teaching at two high schools in Nebraska. The first of these was in DeWitt, Nebraska, Hollingworth's hometown. She was the assistant principal of the high school for one year. Her second teaching position was in the town of McCook. This position lasted for two years. She flourished at these jobs until she moved to New York where her fiance was finishing up his doctorate under Cattell
. Hollingworth obtained an assistant professorship at Barnard College and was able to afford to move her up to New York with him. They were married on December 31, 1908. Leta Hollingworth intended on teaching in New York, but soon discovered that the city had a policy that stated a married women were not allowed to teach. She continued writing and busied herself with housework, yet this proved to be unrewarding. It was difficult to bare the fact that despite her training she was unable to contribute finacially. In 1911 the young couple was able to pull together some tuition money. She continued to study literature, for at that time it remained her top career choice. Although she applied for various fellowships and scholarships she was unable to afford a fulltime student position. It was around this time that she began to consider a career change. She witnessed many problems of social maladjustment. She left literature to go onto persue education and sociology. In 1913 she received her Masters in Education at Columbia.
Leta Hollingworth then began part time work at the Clearing House for Mental Defectives. It was her job to administer Binet intelligence tests. She had to teach herself how to administer them due to a lack of experience. The Civil Service began to supervise the admistration of the tests in 1914 and demanded that examiners take competitive exams to determine their capability. Leta Hollingworth scored well and filled the first position as psychologist under Civil Service in New York. From there she went on to work at the Bellevue Hospital. She was offered the position of chief at the psychological lab. She completed her doctoral work at Columbia under Edward L. Thorndike while maintaining the position of consulting psychologist for the New York Police Department. In 1916 she received her Ph.D. She was promptly offered a teaching position at Columbia Teacher's College. She remained there for the rest of her life. She did, however, devote at least one day of the week to continued work at Bellevue Hospital. She helped establish the Classification Clinic for Adolescents. She went onto become its psychologist. Along with her teaching duties she also trained clinical psychologists, and was the principal of the School ofr Exceptional Children there.
Her work of administering Binet intelligence tests at the Clearing House primed her for work with the gifted, and naturally with the mentally defective as well. Hollingworth also performed research on this other side of the intelligence spectrum as well. She learned, through working with mentally defective children, that many of them actually had normal intelligence. Yet, these children were suffering from adjustment problems during adolescence. From this discovery she began to focus more on this population. She published several books on the topic: The Psychology of Subnormal Children (1920, Special Talents and Defects (1923) and The Psychology of the Adolescent (1928). The last of these became a leading textbook for the following two decades. It even replaced one written by G. Stanely Hall. Several magazines noted the importance of the book and published excerps from the chapter, "Psychology Weaning." The book gives several examples of this psychological process in which it is successfully completed in order to guide puzzled parents and aid them with their children. 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." Additional writing done on children with mental defects can be found in her books, The Problem of Mental Disorder (1934) and in Psychology of Special Disability in Spelling (1918). She even wrote her own textbooks for the classes she taught at Columbia.
It was not until the 1920's began to earnestly work with gifted children. The concern the the proper resources and educational opportunities did not exist for them. The zeitgist of the time was that, "the bright can take care of themselves." Hollingworth was able to devise a method of working with such individuals that stressed the importance of maintaining and keeping contact with them every day. They needed to be indetified 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.
The first long-term study of the gifted began in 1922 in New York. Hollingworth used a group of fifty chidren, aged between seven and nine years old. All of them had IQ's over 155. They were studied over the course of three years. This experiment had two goals. the first was to gain an better understanding of as many aspects of these children as possible. This included information on their backgrounds, faimily life and circumsatnces, thier psychological states and makeup, and also their physical, tempermental and social traits. The second goal was to gain insights as to what the best curriculum for these children would be. The results of this study are published in her book Gifted Children (1926). 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 1936. 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 recieved much public attention. The curriculum that was utilized was called the "Evolution of Common Things". 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 1942. It was a longitudinal study of twelve children with IQ's higher than 180. It began in 1916 after inspiration from her work with the Binet tests. She witnessed a child score 187, which prompted her to seek out eleven other children with similar capabilities. The twenty three years following that initial inspiration was 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 pioneered a truly challenging feild. Individuals who test above 180 IQ are characterized as having a strong desire for personal privacy, rarely handout personal information, are afraid of the potential consequences of being labeled "special", and do not like attention being called to them or their families. Hollingworth was able to work past all of these concerns and conducted research that benefited science while maintaining participant privacy at the same time. She laid the foundations for future studies of gifted children with this work. The results of the study suggested that many exceptionally gifted children suffer adjustment problems due to two factors: inept treatment by adults and lack of intellectual challenge. 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. eccentric.
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 180 with her 1916 longitudinal study.
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. Hollingworth states in her article, "Variability as Related to Sex Differences in Achievement: A Critique", "Undoubtedly one of the most difficult and fundamental problems that today confront thinking women is how to secure for themselves the chance to vary from the mode of their sex, and at the same time to procreate, in a social order that has been built up on the assumption that there is can can be little or not variations in tastes, interests, and abilities within the female sex. It is a problem that has never confronted me." In order to further her research on the "inherently more variable male hypothesis", Dr. Hollingworth performed another experiment in which she used infants because they have not yet been influenced by the environmental conditions that could account for variability differences in adults. She states, "Under these conditions the only measurements of the sexes the may properly be compared with respect to variability are the measurements of infants at birth and for a short period there-after." 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. Dr. Hollingworth and Helen Montague collected data on 1,000 consecutively born males and 1,000 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. "For the first time a serious crack had appeared in the armor of the variability hypothesis".
Hollingworth believed that she was mostly responsible for Thorndike’s revised beliefs on the importance of nurture over nature. She also was responsible for Terman modifying his nativistcs position concerning gender differences in intelligence testing. This was because Hollingworth showed that more men were classified as gifted due to social factors.
Early life and Education
On May 25, 1886, Leta A. Stetter was born in Dawes County, NebraskaDawes County, Nebraska
-National protected areas:*Nebraska National Forest *Oglala National Grassland *Pine Ridge National Recreation Area-Demographics:As of the census of 2000, there were 9,060 people, 3,512 households, and 2,086 families residing in the county. The population density was 6 people per square mile...
near the town of Chadron
Chadron, Nebraska
Chadron is a city in Dawes County, Nebraska, United States. The population was 5,851 at the 2010 census. It is the county seat of Dawes County. Chadron is the home of Chadron State College....
to Margaret Elinor Danley and John G. Stetter. When her mother died after giving birth to her third child, Hollingworth’s father remarried and moved the children to Valentine, Nebraska
Valentine, Nebraska
-Demographics:As of the census of 2000, there were 2,820 people, 1,209 households, and 733 families residing in the city. The population density was 1,401.1 people per square mile . There were 1,373 housing units at an average density of 682.2 per square mile...
to live with him and their stepmother. Hollingworth described the experience of living there as a "fiery furnace" due, in part, to the alcoholism that plagued the household. She was able to escape in 1902 when she graduated from Valentine High School.
When she was only 16 years old, she enrolled at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln where she blossomed academically. During her time at the University of Nebraska, she met and became engaged to Henry Hollingworth. He went onto move to New York to do graduate work at Columbia University. Stetter stayed behind in Nebraska to finish her undergraduate studies. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree in 1906, along with a State Teacher's Certificate. This qualified her to teach English Language and Literature in any Nebraska public high school.
She started her professional career teaching at two high schools in Nebraska. The first of these was in DeWitt, Nebraska, Hollingworth's hometown. She was the assistant principal of the high school for one year. Her second teaching position was in the town of McCook. This position lasted for two years. She flourished at these jobs until she moved to New York where her fiance was finishing up his doctorate under Cattell
Cattell
-People:*Alexander G. Cattell, former United States senator from New Jersey.*Alfred Cattell, Wales international rugby player*James McKeen Cattell, the first psychology professor in the United States....
. Hollingworth obtained an assistant professorship at Barnard College and was able to afford to move her up to New York with him. They were married on December 31, 1908. Leta Hollingworth intended on teaching in New York, but soon discovered that the city had a policy that stated a married women were not allowed to teach. She continued writing and busied herself with housework, yet this proved to be unrewarding. It was difficult to bare the fact that despite her training she was unable to contribute finacially. In 1911 the young couple was able to pull together some tuition money. She continued to study literature, for at that time it remained her top career choice. Although she applied for various fellowships and scholarships she was unable to afford a fulltime student position. It was around this time that she began to consider a career change. She witnessed many problems of social maladjustment. She left literature to go onto persue education and sociology. In 1913 she received her Masters in Education at Columbia.
Leta Hollingworth then began part time work at the Clearing House for Mental Defectives. It was her job to administer Binet intelligence tests. She had to teach herself how to administer them due to a lack of experience. The Civil Service began to supervise the admistration of the tests in 1914 and demanded that examiners take competitive exams to determine their capability. Leta Hollingworth scored well and filled the first position as psychologist under Civil Service in New York. From there she went on to work at the Bellevue Hospital. She was offered the position of chief at the psychological lab. She completed her doctoral work at Columbia under Edward L. Thorndike while maintaining the position of consulting psychologist for the New York Police Department. In 1916 she received her Ph.D. She was promptly offered a teaching position at Columbia Teacher's College. She remained there for the rest of her life. She did, however, devote at least one day of the week to continued work at Bellevue Hospital. She helped establish the Classification Clinic for Adolescents. She went onto become its psychologist. Along with her teaching duties she also trained clinical psychologists, and was the principal of the School ofr Exceptional Children there.
Intelligence Testing, Mental Defects and Exceptional Children
In the 1920s Hollingworth's interests shifted to the study of children, especially those with mental gifts. Due to the efforts of Lewis Madison Terman and his associates, intelligence testing and ability grouping had made their way in public schools as common practices by the 1930s. Terman believed that such intelligence testing was crucial for identifying gifted individuals so that they would receive special attention, be helped to reach their full potential, and become strong members of society. He believed that democracy would benefit from differentiating between the educational experiences of these gifted individuals and the educational experiences of non-gifted individuals. Although he believed strongly in these ideas, Terman spent little time making concrete suggestions concerning how the school curriculum should be changed in order to meet the specific needs of gifted children. Leta Stetter Hollingworth, however, was active in developing educational strategies concerning the development of gifted students. Much of her work was conducted at the same time as Terman's and although the two never met, they had great respect for each other. Even though many of their views overlapped, the two did disagree on a major point. Terman, again, believed that intelligence was an inheritable trait and focused only on defining and describing it. Hollingworth did acknowledge the role of inheritance, but also believed that environamental and educational factors had an effect on intelligence's potential. As a result of this belief, she was more interested in how to properly nurture gifted children and their education.Her work of administering Binet intelligence tests at the Clearing House primed her for work with the gifted, and naturally with the mentally defective as well. Hollingworth also performed research on this other side of the intelligence spectrum as well. She learned, through working with mentally defective children, that many of them actually had normal intelligence. Yet, these children were suffering from adjustment problems during adolescence. From this discovery she began to focus more on this population. She published several books on the topic: The Psychology of Subnormal Children (1920, Special Talents and Defects (1923) and The Psychology of the Adolescent (1928). The last of these became a leading textbook for the following two decades. It even replaced one written by G. Stanely Hall. Several magazines noted the importance of the book and published excerps from the chapter, "Psychology Weaning." The book gives several examples of this psychological process in which it is successfully completed in order to guide puzzled parents and aid them with their children. 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." Additional writing done on children with mental defects can be found in her books, The Problem of Mental Disorder (1934) and in Psychology of Special Disability in Spelling (1918). She even wrote her own textbooks for the classes she taught at Columbia.
It was not until the 1920's began to earnestly work with gifted children. The concern the the proper resources and educational opportunities did not exist for them. The zeitgist of the time was that, "the bright can take care of themselves." Hollingworth was able to devise a method of working with such individuals that stressed the importance of maintaining and keeping contact with them every day. They needed to be indetified 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.
The first long-term study of the gifted began in 1922 in New York. Hollingworth used a group of fifty chidren, aged between seven and nine years old. All of them had IQ's over 155. They were studied over the course of three years. This experiment had two goals. the first was to gain an better understanding of as many aspects of these children as possible. This included information on their backgrounds, faimily life and circumsatnces, thier psychological states and makeup, and also their physical, tempermental and social traits. The second goal was to gain insights as to what the best curriculum for these children would be. The results of this study are published in her book Gifted Children (1926). 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 1936. 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 recieved much public attention. The curriculum that was utilized was called the "Evolution of Common Things". 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 1942. It was a longitudinal study of twelve children with IQ's higher than 180. It began in 1916 after inspiration from her work with the Binet tests. She witnessed a child score 187, which prompted her to seek out eleven other children with similar capabilities. The twenty three years following that initial inspiration was 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 pioneered a truly challenging feild. Individuals who test above 180 IQ are characterized as having a strong desire for personal privacy, rarely handout personal information, are afraid of the potential consequences of being labeled "special", and do not like attention being called to them or their families. Hollingworth was able to work past all of these concerns and conducted research that benefited science while maintaining participant privacy at the same time. She laid the foundations for future studies of gifted children with this work. The results of the study suggested that many exceptionally gifted children suffer adjustment problems due to two factors: inept treatment by adults and lack of intellectual challenge. 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. eccentric.
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 180 with her 1916 longitudinal study.
Interest in the Psychology of Women
While studying at Colombia, Leta Stetter Hollingworth became interested in the misconceptions about women that seemed to be a part of the zeitgeist. Luckily, Thorndike agreed to supervise her dissertation on “Functional Periodicity” which focused on the idea that women are psychologically impaired during menstruation. 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...no part of the period is affected...the variability of performance is not affected by physiological periodicity."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. Hollingworth states in her article, "Variability as Related to Sex Differences in Achievement: A Critique", "Undoubtedly one of the most difficult and fundamental problems that today confront thinking women is how to secure for themselves the chance to vary from the mode of their sex, and at the same time to procreate, in a social order that has been built up on the assumption that there is can can be little or not variations in tastes, interests, and abilities within the female sex. It is a problem that has never confronted me." In order to further her research on the "inherently more variable male hypothesis", Dr. Hollingworth performed another experiment in which she used infants because they have not yet been influenced by the environmental conditions that could account for variability differences in adults. She states, "Under these conditions the only measurements of the sexes the may properly be compared with respect to variability are the measurements of infants at birth and for a short period there-after." 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. Dr. Hollingworth and Helen Montague collected data on 1,000 consecutively born males and 1,000 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. "For the first time a serious crack had appeared in the armor of the variability hypothesis".
Hollingworth believed that she was mostly responsible for Thorndike’s revised beliefs on the importance of nurture over nature. She also was responsible for Terman modifying his nativistcs position concerning gender differences in intelligence testing. This was because Hollingworth showed that more men were classified as gifted due to social factors.