printable versionBing Nursery School, a lab for child-development studies, celebrates 40th year
BY SIMON FIRTH
Psychology Professor Albert Bandura, wearing tie, spoke to parents and children about his research at Bing Nursery School. From left are: Isabel Nichoson, Georgia Nichoson, their father Mark Nichoson, alumni parent Pamela Davis and Jean Zambelli (wife of Mark Nichoson and mother of Isabel and Georgia).
The hundreds of studies conducted at Bing Nursery School since it opened in the winter of 1966 count among "some of the most celebrated in the history of child development," according to Sharon Long, dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences.
Long spoke Saturday, June 3, at a symposium celebrating the 40th anniversary of the campus nursery school, which serves as a research laboratory for the Department of Psychology. In the early 1960s, the department wanted to replace an aging nursery school it was running in Menlo Park. In the first of the Bing family's many gifts to the university, Peter Bing, who had just graduated from Stanford, and his mother, Anna Bing Arnold, matched a $250,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to make the department's wish a reality.
Bing Nursery School has been internationally recognized for the quality of its teaching and for the influential studies in child development it has enabled.
Symposium panelist Albert Bandura, the David Starr Jordan Professor of Social Science in Psychology, recalled that, in the 1960s, television violence was largely believed to drain viewers of aggressive feelings. "We found the opposite to be true," Bandura said. When children watched films of adults aggressively whacking a doll, they overwhelmingly tended to mimic the behavior, he said. These "Bobo doll" experiments demonstrated the power of modeling to change behavior and are among the most cited in the history of psychology.
Eleanor Maccoby, the Barbara Kimball Browning Professor of Psychology, Emerita, discussed her influential studies on the detrimental effects of stress on parent-child interactions, and Mark Lepper, the Albert Ray Lang Professor of Psychology, closed the session with an account of his work investigating a child's intrinsic motivation to learn.
During a second panel discussion, John Flavell, the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences, Emeritus, detailed his explorations of what children understand about concepts such as perception, reality and the act of thinking. Vikram Jaswal, a former Stanford doctoral student who is now an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, outlined research he undertook at the nursery school with Ellen Markman, the Lewis M. Terman Professor, into language acquisition in children.
Laura Carstensen, chair of the Psychology Department, presented Jeanne Lepper, director of the school, with a plaque in honor of her 17 years of service there. It read, in part, "You make the world a better place for children."
Following the symposium, a tea party was held at the school, which is located on Escondido Road. The school's famously spacious play yards were festooned with flags and filled with children and their families enjoying sandwiches, fruit salad and a celebratory cake.
Simon Firth is a freelance writer. His daughter attends Bing Nursery School.