Florence Goodenough

Florence Laura Goodenough (August 6, 1886 – April 4, 1959) 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 to 1947. She is best known for publishing the book Measurement Of Intelligence By Drawings, where she introduced the Goodenough Draw-A-Man test (now the Draw-A-Person Test) to assess intelligence in young children through nonverbal measurement. She is noted for developing the Minnesota Preschool Scale. In 1931, she published two books, titled Experimental Child Study (with John E. Anderson) 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 IQ.

Florence Laura Goodenough was born on August 6, 1886 to Alice Gertrude Day and Linus North Goodenough in Honesdale, Pennsylvania. She was the youngest child, with two brothers and six sisters. Her family was involved in farming. She was homeschooled and received the equivalent of a high school diploma.

Goodenough received her primary education at home until attending Millersville Normal School. This school had few options of careers for women, and she picked teaching. In 1908, Goodenough graduated from Millersville Normal School with a Bachelor of Pedagogy. There is not much documentation of her time at Millersville; however, it is known that after earning her degree, she moved on to teach at the University of Minnesota from 1912 to 1919. She then went back to college at Columbia University. She received a Bachelor of science in 1920, and a masters of art degree in 1921, under Leta Hollingworth. Hollingworth was a psychologist and Goodenough's mentor. In 1921, Hollingworth recommended Goodenough to Lewis Terman to become a research assistant. From 1920 to 1921, she also served as the director of research for the Rutherford and Perth Amboy public schools in the state of New Jersey. It was during her time in public schools when she actually conducted a majority of her data. Goodenough then went to Stanford University, beginning her doctoral studies by working with Lewis Terman on his Gifted Children Survey, which was later published as Genetic Studies of Genius.

Lewis originally assigned her to do field research for the paper in Los Angeles. She first served as the chief field psychologist, and then reached the higher status of chief research psychologist from 1922 to 1923, overseeing the other psychologists with her. She was listed as a contributor to Terman's book Genetic Studies of Genius; at the time, it was rare for women to be listed as contributors to research. Goodenough earned her PhD in psychology in 1924, from Stanford University. Goodenough then went to the University of Minnesota, a Child Welfare Institute, where she worked as a research professor under John E. Anderson from 1925 to 1930. Anderson and Goodenough were noted as offering some of the first undergraduate and graduate courses in developmental psychology. She then became a professor of psychology from 1931 to 1947.

Goodenough studied psychology in a time where the study of nature vs. nurture was argued for what contributed more towards a child's development. Her mentor, Lewis Terman, believed nature was the more important factor for child development, arguing that the environment showed heavy influence in their personality and abilities in school. Two main areas of focus when discussing nature vs nurture effects were on a child's IQ and their emotional development. Goodenough opposed the previous well respected views, and believed it was the child's maturation that played the major role in a child's emotional development. She wanted to test the basis of fixed intelligence with the results shown through IQ testing. Defending these beliefs, she published books explaining her theories and thoughts on this in 1939–1940.

In addition to her time at the University of Minnesota, Goodenough created the draw-a-man test, used to measure intelligence in children. She published the test in Measurement of Intelligence (1926), including detailed accounts of procedures, scoring, and examples. After her publication of the draw-a-man test, Goodenough expanded the Stanford-Binet Scale for children into the Minnesota Preschool Scale in 1932. Goodenough's most significant contribution to psychology was her advancement of sampling in 1928, which would become to be known as event and time sampling, a method that is still in use in the 21st century.

Goodenough published her time sampling approach in Anger in Young Children (1931), which analyzed the methods used in evaluating children. Her time sampling technique was critiqued for using mothers as research participants, with many doubting that nonscientists would successfully record observations for a study. Goodenough's objective was to analyze John B. Watson's assertion that newborns were primarily only capable of three different emotions: rage, fear, and love. She gathered forty-one participants, ranging from infancy through seven years old, and trained the parents to use event sampling and track the outbursts of anger they saw in their children. It was through this experiment that she suggested that children who were less than one year old had the most notable triggers for anger, due to repetitive child care, minimal physical irritations, and limitations of physical movement. However, Goodenough's research findings indicated that by the time the child reached the age of four, social interactions became the most significant basis of anger. Goodenough's findings led her to theorize that it was not the environment that was most influential in emotional development, but actually maturation in young children. Overall, Goodenough's publication led to a crucial descriptive awareness for parents and professionals to help acknowledge diverse emotional inclinations in child development. This ultimately led her to continue with several more publications on child development, maturation, and emotion. Many researchers still appreciate Goodenough's publication on emotional development because of its detailed description of the methodology used. Goodenough's experiment represented one of the first large-scale analyses done through observations, and her research is still considered one of the most detailed analyses of emotional development in children.

Goodenough was an active feminist throughout her life, typified by her fight in male-dominated careers like psychology. She especially showed frustration when she and many other women were not allowed to participate in wartime jobs. The many psychology studies conducted involving the war were only being researched by men, while women were expected to volunteer in the local communities. Goodenough was the president of the National Council of Women Psychologists (NCWP), through which she fought for women psychologists to also be allowed to participate in wartime studies. She succeeded, and she and other women were able to obtain paid employment as military personnel.