Florence Goodenough
American child psychologist and test author
American child psychologist who created the Draw-a-Man test of children's intelligence, published in 1926, and worked at the University of Minnesota's Institute of Child Welfare from 1925.
Why this person matters
Goodenough devised a nonverbal test for children aged 2 to 13 that took about ten minutes. She worked as chief field and research psychologist on Lewis Terman's study of gifted children, and was among the first to criticise ratio IQ and to recommend percentile scores.
Main contributions
Draw-a-Man test
Published in Measurement of Intelligence by Drawings (1926), the test scored children's drawings of a man as a nonverbal measure of intelligence. Her former student Dale Harris revised it in 1963 and added a Draw-a-Woman test.
Observation of young children
She published Anger in Young Children (1931) and, with John Anderson, Experimental Child Study (1931).
Textbooks
She wrote Developmental Psychology (1934) and Mental Testing (1949).
Context and limits
Later research is reported to show that the Draw-a-Man test does not measure IQ as such. A Draw-a-Woman version was added in part because critics thought many girls could not identify with a male figure. Her time-sampling method was criticised for relying on mothers as observers. Sources differ on when her Minnesota post ended; one profile says she retired in 1947.
In your introductory course
Lifespan development.She appears in testing and development chapters as an example of an early nonverbal child test and of how such tests were later reassessed.
Related course reading: Psychology 2e, section 9.1. This is course context rather than a biographical source.
Years of active work
- 1924
She received her PhD from Stanford University.
- 1925
She joined the Institute of Child Welfare at the University of Minnesota.
- 1926
She published Measurement of Intelligence by Drawings.
- 1946
She became president of the Society for Research in Child Development, to 1947.
Sources
- Psychology's Feminist Voices, Florence GoodenoughArchive or museum. Institutional biography inspected.
- Wikipedia, Florence GoodenoughReference work. Reference article inspected.