Bucking the System: Women in the Health
Sciences at the University of Iowa, 1874 - 1950

Institute of Child Behavior

47. Dr. Beth Lucy Wellman (1895-1952) Professor of Child Psychology The Iowa Child Welfare Research Station June 24, 1952

Beth Wellman's groundbreaking studies on intelligence are still highly relevant today. In the 1930s she demonstrated that a person's intelligence quotient (IQ) is alterable depending on stimulation from the environment. Her findings shook the world of psychology and prompted the establishment of such programs as Head Start, Home Start and early education for the mentally retarded. Wellman's studies continue to hold implications for the battle against discrimination according to class, race and gender. Education and Academic Positions Beth Lucy Wellman was born in Clarion, Iowa in 1895. The town of Wellman, Iowa, was founded by her father. She graduated from Ames High School in 1912 and received her B.A. from the Iowa State Teachers College at Cedar Falls in 1920. In that same year she became the secretary to Dr. Bird T. Baldwin, the first director of the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station (ICWRS), and enrolled in the psychology program. From 1921 to 1924 Wellman also worked as a research assistant at the Station. During this period she was responsible for taking all the physical measurements of the children in the preschool laboratories. Wellman then worked for a year as a research associate at Columbia University in New York City. She was offered the position of chief psychologist there and a similar position at Yale, but she returned to the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station where she was named Research Assistant Professor after earning her PhD in child psychology in 1925. In 1937 she was appointed Professor of Child Psychology.

Personal Tragedies
Wellman and Bird T. Baldwin planned to marry in May 1928. On May 1, Baldwin traveled to a convention in Cleveland where he contracted erysipelas. He returned to Iowa City on May 4 in critical condition. Baldwin developed pneumonia and died May 12, 1928, a week before the wedding.

Wellman became the legal guardian of Baldwin's three youngest children, twin boys ten years of age and a five-year old girl. Baldwin's invalid wife had died several years earlier and a live-in couple had cared for the four children. After Baldwin died, Wellman's mother moved into the new household. Her management of the household and finances allowed Wellman to pursue her professional goals.

In 1940 Wellman underwent surgery for breast cancer but returned to work soon after the mastectomy. The cancer eventually took her life in 1952.

Wellman and the "Nature vs. Nurture" Debate
As a scholar Wellman was extremely productive, publishing over seventy articles and overseeing many theses and dissertations. Marie Skodak Crissey, a member of one of Wellman's research teams in the 1930s, described Wellman:

All students, not her advisees alone, regarded Beth Wellman as a role model -- for integrity, for respect for facts, for careful workmanship, for clarity of expression, for personal commitment to scientific inquiry. Beth Wellman labored in the modest Iowa Child Welfare Research Station, but influenced child welfare, child development research, and generations of professionals who put into action the implications of her research....Few studies begun in academic circles have had as much influence on public policy.

Before Wellman's controversial studies were published in the 1930s, psychologists and the general public attributed intelligence solely to genetics. Environment was considered to be irrelevant to intellectual development. Wellman's findings that a child's IQ and scholastic performance are dependent on the quality of intellectual stimulation and social environment comprised a major portion of the "nature versus nurture" debate in the first half of this century. Her findings have had important implications for the struggle for equal rights in the second half of this century, before which women and other minorities were believed to be intellectually inferior to white males.

Wellman studied children from both privileged and disadvantaged backgrounds--professors' children enrolled in the University of Iowa schools and children in the Davenport Soldiers' Orphans' Home. She found that children who attended the University preschools, which were known to be intellectually stimulating, gained significantly in IQ, sometimes moving from the "average" to the "genius" classification. This dramatic rise in IQ was found to have significant effects on later intellectual ability and achievement. In comparison, children who attended public schools showed little or no change in intelligence, had lower scores on performance tests and accomplished less at the university level. Wellman's studies demonstrated the importance of early education and intellectual stimulation, both of which were shown to have lifelong effects.

48. Child Performing Tracing Board Test ICWRS Preschool Laboratories circa 1924 Wellman and Motor Coordination: In her early work, Dr. Beth Wellman was concerned with the development of motor abilities in children. In one of her studies children were asked to trace a vertical groove down a board. In all previous uses of this apparratus, a bell would ring if the child strayed from the groove and hit the sides. Wellman thought the sound of the bell would delight the children; she reversed the set-up so that the bell would ring only while the child traced the groove. The results:Wellman's study showed that factors such as handedness, age, suggestion and practice influenced a child's performance. She found that neither sex nor intelligence affected a child's ability or determined his or her performance level. #196-57

Another study completed with her colleagues Skeels, Updegraff and Williams on children aged two to five in the Davenport Soldiers' Orphans' Home produced startling results. A preschool was established at the orphanage "to add richness to the lives of the children," as Beth Wellman explained in a 1939 interview. Two groups of preschool-age children were formed; the subjects in each groups were matched at the beginning of the study according to IQ, sex, length of residence in the institution and nutrititional status. Only one group attended the preschool during the three-year period. The research team found that preschool enhanced the intelligence of the children who attended it and, more surprisingly, that the intelligence of those children who did not attend the preschool actually decreased.

The evidence for loss of intelligence was shocking. Wellman's findings suggested that placement in institutions for some mentally disabled children could have been avoided if their early intellectual stimulation had been greater. The results highlighted the need for improvements in state institutions and for early education of many disadvantaged groups in society.

Historical Impact
The impact of Wellman's research and publications extended far beyond the academic circles of psychology. In his tribute to Wellman, Boyd McCandless, director of the Station at the time of her death, attested to the significance of Wellman's productivity:

Her contributions to the literature on the development of intelligence, cultural and educational impacts upon intelligence, motor development, and the social psychology of childhood are known to all in psychology, have had profound impacts on practices in social work and education, as well as in psychology, and have stimulated much further research.

Updegraff came to the Station in 1925 after teaching psychology at Vassar, her alma mater,for two years. Originally from Pennsylvania, she entered Vassar more upon her parents' decision than her own, she remembers. Updegraff double-majored in psychology and economics as an undergraduate. The 1924 publication by Bird T. Baldwin and Lorle I. Stecher of the Research Station on the psychology of the preschool child stimulated her interest in the subject. Attracted to the Station where original research with young children was being conducted, Updegraff joined the staff as a graduate student research assistant. In 1928 she received her PhD in child welfare from The University of Iowa and was appointed Research Associate. She progressed through the ranks, finally becoming Professor of Preschool Education in 1951.

Updegraff's first challenge at the Station was learning to work with the children. She recalls her first assignment in the kindergarten room on the first day of school. As the children were arriving, one boy began to climb out on the windowsill which was three stories above the street. The teacher called to Updegraff and said, "You go over and take care of that one."

The very concept of a preschoolwas new in the 1920s. Nursery schoolswere spread throughout the country, but they were primarily custodial, not educational centers. The University of Iowa was the first institution to erect a building specifically for the education of young children. The Preschool Laboratories were established to provide children with early education outside the home, and to provide staff with research subjects. "People were just beginning to think about what happens to the child between these ages [eighteen months and six years], " Updegraff recounts. Besides undergoing thousands of measurements to chart their physical growth, the children also participated in numerous tests for the study of motor, social, and intellectual development. Children's use of language and comprehension were also studied.

Updegraff was among the psychologists and educators who first acknowledged and studied individual differences between children. She investigated aggression, reaction to failure, children's control of their peers, and their responses to adults and other children in varying situations. Updegraff states,

In managing a group of children, adults need to understand that they're all different--that there are realdifferences in their experiences. They're all developing at different rates. They have different problems and desires. How well can a child listen? How well will he listen? What are the children's likes and dislikes? What can you do to help them be with each other? Teachers need to know what they can about developmental psychology and they need to know what they can about the children they're working with and they need to work them together.

The students Updegraff trained for teaching and research in the new fields of child development and preschool education often went on to distinguished careers. The heavy demand in the 1940s and 1950s for teachers trained at the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station is evidence of the reputation Updegraff had established for her division. Even in the early years of the Preschool Laboratories, educators and researchers interested in the development of the young child came from the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Wisconsin and the University of Michigan in order to observe the model program at The University of Iowa. "The very purpose of it was innovative," states Updegraff. "The idea of it spread. People have continued to use the thinking and the scientific aspects of the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station."

49. 10 East Market Street, Facility for the Home Laboratory of the ICWRS May 1930 Children participating in full-day sessions in the 1930s attended the Home Laboratory. #196-502

Working closely with federal agencies, Updegraff tailored her courses during the war years to meet the needs of children, parents, and teachers-in-training. Government-financed nursery schools were established all over the United States, particularly in areas related to the war effort, such as in Portland, Oregon, where families were involved in shipbuilding. Teachers were sent to the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station for intense, 20-day training periods directed by Updegraff. These agencies were chiefly concerned with fostering family life during the war years. Programs were designed for parents whose lives were drastically changed by the world crisis.

50. Fieldtrip to the University of Iowa Museum of Natural History circa 1920 The psychologists and teachers associated with the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station Preschool Laboratories were dedicated to encouraging the intellectual growth of the students by providing a great variety of experiences and learning situations. Fieldtrips to the Natural History Museum, a greenhouse, and the countryside provided what Beth Wellman referred to as "extensions of environment," which she held to be as necessary to a child's development as proper physical care. #196-202

Retiring from teaching in 1964, Updegraff continued to devote herself to educational programs and research by serving as a consultant for Head Start programs throughout the United States. Head Start was designed to give children from disadvantaged families some of the educational and cultural advantages usually associated with a middle-class background. "This is the one program that has been scientifically proven to be helpful," Updegraff asserts. She also served as a consultant for Follow Through, a program that studied former Head Start participants. During the 1960s the goals and methods of Head Start and Follow Through paralleled, on a national level, the three-year study of preschool children at the Iowa Soldiers' Orphans' Home which Updegraff had conducted with Beth Wellman thirty years earlier. (See the exhibit on this study for more details.)

Updegraff was thus able to witness a fruition of the ideas and practices she had initiated in child development, child welfare and preschool education earlier in the century. She states, though, that our understanding of the development of the child under five years of age is far from complete: "In our current educational work for children, the study will probably continue long into the future."

51. Members of the University of Iowa Institute of Child Behavior and Development circa 1955 The late 1940s and 1950s saw a rise in the number of male graduate students and research heads at the institution as men re-entered the work force. Although women had formerly been encouraged to serve their country by working in the war effort, they were now encouraged to "serve their country and their men" by staying home and having babies. Their education and career opportunities were greatly diminished. Around 1950 the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station was renamed as the Institute of Child Behavior and Development. The term "child welfare" had acquired social connotations which no longer clearly indicated the scientific interests of the institution. The Institute was dissolved in the early 1970s.