Goodenough, Florence Laura (1886–1959)

American developmental psychologist. Born Florence Laura Goodenough in Honesdale, Pennsylvania, on August 6, 1886; died in Lakeland, Florida, on April 4, 1959; youngest of eight children of Lines Goodenough (a farmer) and Alice (Day) Goodenough; attended rural school in Rileyville, Pennsylvania; Millersville (PA) Normal School, B.Pd., 1908; undergraduate degree from Columbia University, 1920, master's, 1921; Ph.D. from Stanford University; never married; no children.

Florence Goodenough spent a decade teaching in small rural schools in Pennsylvania before earning bachelor's and master's degrees at Columbia during the early 1920s. She then transferred to Stanford University in California, where, for her Ph.D. thesis, she devised the "Draw-a-Man" intelligence test, which could determine the level of development by having a child submit a simple drawing of a man. Her thesis, called Measurement of Intelligence by Drawings, was published in 1926 and widely used. In 1926, after working for two years as chief psychologist at the Minneapolis Child Guidance Clinic, Goodenough joined the faculty at the University of Minnesota. Quickly attaining the rank of research professor, she studied a wide range of problems in the field of child development. Two impressive works, Experimental Child Study (with John E. Anderson) and Anger in Young Children (both published in 1931), scrutinized the methods used in evaluating children.

During the 1930s and 1940s, her work on intelligence tests put her at the vanguard of psychological research. In 1932, she created the Minnesota Preschool Scale, which estimated intelligence in young children. It was revised in 1940 and 1942, the year she published The Mental Growth of Children from Two to Fourteen Years, written in collaboration with Katherine Mauer . During World War II, Goodenough created a test used for officer selection in the Women's Army Corps. Unfortunately, her work was cut short by diabetes, which eventually forced her to retire from the University of Minnesota. Although she lost most of her sight to the disease and was virtually deaf, she continued to work with assistance from her niece Lois M. Rynkiewicz. In 1956, Goodenough published Exceptional Children, followed by yet a third revision of her classic Developmental Psychology in 1959, the year of her death.

sources:

Bailey, Brooke. The Remarkable Lives of 100 Women Healers and Scientists. Holbrook, MA: Bob Adams, 1994.

Sicherman, Barbara, and Carol Hurd Green, eds. Notable American Women: The Modern Period. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1980.

collections:

Florence Goodenough's papers are in the Archives of the University of Michigan and in the files of the Institute of Child Welfare.