Bird Thomas Baldwin

Last updated • 2 min readFrom Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia

Bird Thomas Baldwin (May 31, 1875 – May 11, 1928) was an American educator, psychologist, and researcher of child development. He was the director of the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station. As part of the United States Army, he was a psychologist for wounded soldiers.

Contents

Personal life and early career

Baldwin was born on May 31, 1875, in Marshallton, Chester County, Pennsylvania. He received a BS degree at Swarthmore College in 1900, later becoming the principal of Moorestown Friends School in Moorestown, New Jersey, for two years. While continuing his education at Harvard College, where he received his AM and PhD, he was employed by the University of Pennsylvania for psychology and education. He was a psychology student at Leipzig University in 1906. Baldwin taught at Westchester State Normal School, the University of Texas, and Swarthmore College. [1]

Research and child development

In 1917, Baldwin was appointed as the director of the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station (ICWRS). The research station was the first of its kind. [1] For a little over a year, Baldwin was the major of the Sanitary Corps in the Surgeon General of the United States Army office. He helped soldiers psychologically at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. [2] During the 1920s, Baldwin received grants from the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial to further the goals of the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station. Baldwin worked with others to discover what caused "normal" children to develop. The research station became well known during the late 1920s, while also training nursery schoolteachers and educating parents. Baldwin earned praise for his work internationally. Baldwin had his daughter, who had issues learning, be placed in the ICWRS observational nursery school. After his daughter's learning improved, Baldwin began to believe that IQ tests were misleading which led him to focus more on mental development. [1] Baldwin was a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. [2] The book The Psychology of the Preschool Child is Baldwin's study of children ages two to six. [3]

Baldwin died on May 11, 1928, from an infection that he received at a barbershop while being shaved. [1]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Albert Bandura</span> Canadian-American psychologist (1925–2021)

Albert Bandura was a Canadian-American psychologist. He was a professor of social science in psychology at Stanford University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wolfgang Köhler</span> German-American psychologist and phenomenologist

Wolfgang Köhler was a German psychologist and phenomenologist who, like Max Wertheimer and Kurt Koffka, contributed to the creation of Gestalt psychology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Henry H. Goddard</span> American psychologist and eugenicist (1866–1957)

Henry Herbert Goddard was an American psychologist, eugenicist, and segregationist during the early 20th century. He is known especially for his 1912 work The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness, which he himself came to regard as flawed for its ahistoric depiction of the titular family, and for translating the Binet-Simon Intelligence Test into English in 1908 and distributing an estimated 22,000 copies of the translated test across the United States. He also introduced the term "moron" for clinical use.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Harry Harlow</span> American psychologist

Harry Frederick Harlow was an American psychologist best known for his maternal-separation, dependency needs, and social isolation experiments on rhesus monkeys, which manifested the importance of caregiving and companionship to social and cognitive development. He conducted most of his research at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow worked with him for a short period of time.

Urie Bronfenbrenner was a Russian-born American psychologist best known for using a contextual framework to better understand human development. This framework, broadly referred to as 'ecological systems theory', was formalized in an article published in American Psychologist, articulated in a series of propositions and hypotheses in his most cited book, The Ecology of Human Development and further developed in The Bioecological Model of Human Development and later writings. He argued that natural experiments and applied developmental interventions provide valuable scientific opportunities. These beliefs were exemplified in his involvement in developing the US Head Start program in 1965. Bronfenbrenner's writings about the limitations of understanding child development solely from experimental laboratory research and the potential for using contextual variability to provide insight into developmental processes was important in changing the focus of developmental psychology.

Sir Michael Llewellyn Rutter was the first person to be appointed professor of child psychiatry in the United Kingdom. He has been described as the "father of child psychiatry".

John Hurley Flavell is an American developmental psychologist specializing in children's cognitive development who serves as Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor, Emeritus at Stanford University. A foundational researcher of metacognition and metamemory, he is a member of both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Robert A. Rescorla was an American psychologist who specialized in the involvement of cognitive processes in classical conditioning focusing on animal learning and behavior.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lightner Witmer</span> American psychologist

Lightner Witmer was an American psychologist. He introduced the term "clinical psychology" and is often credited with founding the field that it describes. Witmer created the world's first "psychological clinic" at the University of Pennsylvania in 1896, including the first journal of clinical psychology and the first clinical hospital school in 1907.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Carl Seashore</span> American psychologist and educator (1866–1949)

Carl Emil Seashore, born Sjöstrand was a prominent American psychologist and educator. He was the author of numerous books and articles principally regarding the fields of speech–language pathology, music education, and the psychology of music and art. He served as Dean of the Graduate College of University of Iowa from 1908–1937. He is most commonly associated with the development of the Seashore Tests of Musical Ability.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Florence Goodenough</span> American psychologist

Florence Laura Goodenough was an American psychologist and professor at the University of Minnesota who studied child intelligence and various problems in the field of child development. She was president of the Society for Research in Child Development from 1946-1947. She is best known for published book The Measurement of Intelligence, where she introduced the Goodenough Draw-A-Man test to assess intelligence in young children through nonverbal measurement. She is noted for developing the Minnesota Preschool Scale. In 1931 she published two notable books titled Experimental Child Study and Anger in Young Children which analyzed the methods used in evaluating children. She wrote the Handbook of Child Psychology in 1933, becoming the first known psychologist to critique ratio I.Q.

Lila Ruth Gleitman was an American professor of psychology and linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. She was an internationally renowned expert on language acquisition and developmental psycholinguistics, focusing on children's learning of their first language.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert Richardson Sears</span>

Robert Richardson Sears was an American psychologist who specialized in child psychology and the psychology of personality. He was the head of the psychology department at Stanford and later dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences there, continued the long-term I.Q. studies of Lewis Madison Terman at Stanford, and authored many pivotal papers and books on various aspects of psychology.

The Iowa Child Welfare Research Station attached to the University of Iowa conducted pioneering research into child development and child psychology during the 20th century. German-American psychologist Kurt Zadek Lewin worked there and Robert Richardson Sears directed the station for much of the 1940s. Many other eminent psychologists, physiologists, and researchers were associated with the station and its work.

David Krech was an American Jewish experimental and social psychologist who lectured predominately at the University of California, Berkeley. Throughout his education and career endeavors, Krech was with many psychologists including Edward Tolman, Karl Lashley, and Rensis Likert.

Lois Barclay Murphy was an American developmental psychologist who had an important impact on the study of normal child development. Murphy was instrumental in changing the ways in which children were viewed in psychology—previous work tended to focus on pathology, while Murphy emphasized more positive and social elements, including normal development and the development of empathy and ethics in children. She collaborated on 16 works with her husband, Gardner Murphy, published a book about his work after his death as well as several on her own work. She founded the Early Childhood Center (EEC), a college laboratory school focused on child development, at Sarah Lawrence College in 1937 which is still in operation today. Murphy was presented with the G. Stanley Hall Award in developmental psychology in recognition of her contributions to the field.

Psyche Cattell was an American psychologist who studied children and aimed to develop intelligence tests for infants. She was Chief Psychologist at Lancaster Guidance Clinic in Lancaster, Pennsylvania from 1939 to 1963. She published a book on intelligence testing and established a nursery school in her home which operated from 1941 to 1974. She is best known for the Cattell Infant Intelligence Scale, a downward extension of IQ testing used to assess children's development.

Helen Bradford Thompson Woolley was an American psychologist, known for her contributions to the educational sector, research on sex differences and research methods. Woolley's interest in scientific inquiry was prompted by the work of her father, Paul Thompson, who was an inventor. Woolley's academic achievement and resultant scholarship allowed her to pursue studies in psychology at the University of Chicago.

Margaret Byrd Rawson was an American educator, researcher and writer. She was an early leader in the field of dyslexia, conducting one of the longest-running studies of language disorders ever undertaken and publishing nine books on dyslexia.

Lois Hayden Meek Stolz (1891–1984) was an American psychologist and educator in the field of child development and parent-child relations. She was a (full) professor of psychology at Stanford University and the author of several highly regarded texts.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 Cravens, Hamilton. "Baldwin, Bird Thomas". The Biographical Dictionary of Iowa. Retrieved August 20, 2023.
  2. 1 2 O'Shea, Vincent (1924). The Child: His Nature and His Needs. Childrens Foundation. p. 489.
  3. The Booklist. American Library Association. 1926. p. 5.