Nancy Bayley
by
Lauren Julius Harris
Department of Psychology
Michigan State University
Send correspondence to Lauren Julius Harris, Department of Psychology, Psychology Research
Building, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan 48824, e-mail:
[email protected]; FAX: 517-353-1652.
Bayley, Nancy (September 28, 1899 C November 25, 1994)
Nancy Bayley was born and reared in The Dalles, Oregon, and died in Carmel, California.
In the history of developmental psychology, few other individuals loom so large.
After grade school and high school in her home town, Bayley attended the University of
Washington, in Seattle. She planned to become an English teacher but changed to psychology
after taking an introductory class taught by Edwin Guthrie, a leader in the psychology of
learning. At Washington, she earned her B.S. in 1922 and M.S. in 1924. For her M.S, she studied
the construction of performance tests for preschool children, a project prefiguring her later work
on the development of intelligence. For her Ph.D., awarded in 1926 from the University of Iowa,
she conducted one of the first studies of children's fears using the galvanic skin response.
From 1926-1928, Bayley taught at the University of Wyoming and then joined the
Institute of Child Welfare (now Institute of Child Development) at the University of California
at Berkeley as a research associate. There, she began what became known as the Berkeley Growth
Study, a landmark longitudinal investigation on a large sample of healthy infants born in 1928 and
1929. Over the next half-century, Bayley and her colleagues followed these individuals as they
grew from infancy to middle-age. The work yielded important discoveries about physical, motor,
and mental development, variability and individual differences, the relation of mental performance
to environmental factors, including socioeconomic factors such as parental education, and the
predictability of later mental and physical status from child scores, and it remains a treasure trove
for scholars today. It also helped advance the study of adult development and the effects of
historical forces on child development, including World War II and the Korean war. Over this
period, Bayley also developed the Bayley Scales of Motor and Mental Development, still
acknowledged as providing the best standardized measures of infant development and used
throughout the world.
In 1954, Bayley moved to Bethesda, Maryland, to become chief of the section in child
development at the National Institute of Mental Health. Her many accomplishments there
included participation in the National Collaborative Perinatal Project for the study of cerebral
palsy and other disorders. In 1964, she returned to Berkeley, where she continued her studies of
individuals from her Growth Study.
Bayley's many honors and awards include the G. Stanley Hall Award (1971) for
outstanding contributions to developmental psychology, the Presidency of Division 7
(Developmental Psychology) of the American Psychological Association (1953-1954), and the
Gold Medal from the American Psychological Foundation (1982). Throughout her long and
distinguished career, Bayley sought to apply "scientific knowledge in the interests of human
welfare and happiness" (1956, p. 121). She succeeded, and we are all the richer for it.
For Further Reading
Articles by Nancy Bayley
Bayley, N. (1926). Performance tests for three-, four-, and five-year-old children. Journal
of Genetic Psychology, 33, 435-454.
Bayley, N. (1928). A study of fear by means of the psychogalvanic technique.
Psychological Monographs, 38, 1-38.
Bayley, N. (1933). Mental growth during the first three years: A developmental study of
sixty-one children by repeated tests. Genetic Psychology Monographs, 14, 1-92.
Bayley, N. (1940). Factors influencing the growth of intelligence in young children. In
G.M. Whipple (Ed.), Intelligence: Its Nature and Nurture. Yearbook of the National Society for
the Study of Education, Vol. 39 (Part II, pp. 49-79). Bloomington, Illinois: Public School
Publishing.
Bayley, N. (1955). On the growth of intelligence. American Psychologist, 10, 805-818.
Bayley, N. (1956). Implicit and explicit values in science as related to human growth and
development. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 2, 121-126.
Bayley, N., & Schaefer, E.S. (1964). Correlations of maternal and child behaviors with the
development of mental abilities: Data from the Berkeley Growth Study. Monographs of the
Society for Research in Child Development, 29 (6, Serial No. 97).
Articles about Nancy Bayley
Lipsitt, L.P., & Eichorn, D.H. (1990). Nancy Bayley (1899 - ). In A.N. O'Connell & N.F.
Russo (Eds.). Women in Psychology: A Bio-bibliographic Sourcebook (pp. 23-29). New York:
Greenwood Press.
Rosenblith, J.F. (1992). A singular career: Nancy Bayley. Developmental Psychology, 28,
747-758. Reprinted in R.D. Parke, P.A. Ornstein, J.J. Riser, & C. Zahn-Waxler (Eds.) (1994), A
Century of Developmental Psychology (Chapter 17, pp. 499-525). Washington, D.C.: Americal
Psychological Association.