Leta+Hollingworth

Leta Hollingworth

Leta Hollingworth is known for her contributions to the field of women’s psychology. However, she is best known for her work with gifted children. The whole foundation of Hollingworth's research is that gifted children need more than just to be challenged academically; she believed gifted children needed emotion, social, and psychological support.

In the 1920s she began studying gifted children and became a leading expert on the psychology of educating gifted children. She was primarily concerned that proper opportunities did not exist for gifted students. With almost twenty years of research, she wrote many books, including textbooks used in her own university in which she taught at Columbia.

Hollingworth's research took place around the time of Lewis Terman, whom you will read of next. Terman recognized the need for gifted testing and ability grouping. He felt testing was crucial in order for gifted individuals to receive special attention and reach their full potential. Even though Terman believed strongly in these ideas, he did not have much to offer in the way of developing changes to curriculum in order to meet the special need of gifted children. Hollingworth, on the other hand, was implemental in addressing the specific needs of gifted students and developing curriculum to help them be successful and prevent boredom.

One other contrast between the two, and one that was very significant to Hollingworth, is that Terman believed intelligence was an inheritable trait. Hollingworth acknowledged the role of inheritance, but also believed that environment and educational factors had an effect on intelligence's potential. Consequently, she was more concerned about how to nurture giftedness rather than just define and describe it.

Hollingworth found that many exceptional children suffered from adjustment problems due to a lack of intellectual challenge and inept treatment by adults. She found that adults often gave these children less attention because it was believed that they were self-sufficient.

From her research, she found 11 key areas in which she had specific concerns for gifted children.
 * 1) Adjustment to Classmates
 * 2) Finding enough hard and interesting work at school
 * 3) Playing with other children
 * 4) Social Isolation
 * 5) Difficulties with Leadership
 * 6) Learning to "suffer fools gladly"
 * 7) Problem of Conformity
 * 8) Avoiding the formation of habits of extreme chicanery
 * 9) Students understanding giftedness and all its implications at an early age
 * 10) Respecting authority
 * 11) Dealing with the special problems of being a gifted girl

It was an easy assessment for Hollingworth to make that gifted girls had special difficulties adjusting. Her work in psychology began primarily as refuting the dogma that women were inferior. Her dissertation was written on her findings that women were “defective” during their menstrual cycle. Her research led her to become an early feminist voice on the abilities and strengths of women, which she was able to continue to develop in her research on giftedness and females.

Dr. Hollingworth’s solution to some of the social and emotional problems of gifted children was to segregate them into classes of children with similar abilities. Accelerating the content of classes and getting students to learn more rapidly was not her goal. She aimed for a curriculum that would create happier and more well-adjusted human beings.

Take a moment and view the video below to understand how relevant Hollingworth's conclusion was through the perspective of two students who are gifted. They composed a video on what it's like to be gifted and how being grouped with students of the same abilities has helped them.

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Hollingworth’s contribution to the field of giftedness is vast. She authored in 1926 the first comprehensive textbook on the psychology and education of gifted children entitled //Gifted Children: Their Nature and Nurture//. She created a special school in New York in 1935 for gifted children, currently called the Speyer Legacy School. Hollingworth created a set of best practices for meeting the educational and emotional needs of gifted children. Her time teaching this class produced nearly forty research articles, a textbook, and guidelines on how the curriculum of gifted students should be taught.

The following questions below are based on Dr. Leta Hollingworth's research of gifted children. Based on what you’ve read, test your knowledge of what Leta Hollingworth researched, believed, and taught about the psychological make-up of gifted children and their social and emotional needs.

[|Dr. Leta Hollingworth]