The third of five children of Prudence Cooper and Frederick W. Bayley, Nancy Bayley was born in The Dalles, Oregon, in 1899. She and her siblings were delivered by her aunt who had become a country physician after her husband died. Bayley’s father was head of the grocery in a department store in The Dalles. Childhood illness prevented Bayley from attending school until she was eight, but she quickly made up the missed grades and completed high school in The Dalles.
Defines her niche in developmental psychology
Although she entered the University of Washington in Seattle with plans to become an English teacher, Bayley quickly switched to psychology after taking an introductory course with E. R. Guthrie. She earned her B.S. degree in 1922 and her M.S. degree two years later, while serving as a research assistant at the Gatzert Foundation for Child Welfare at the university. For her master’s thesis under Stevenson Smith, Bayley devised performance tests for preschoolers, a subject that would occupy her for the rest of her life. A graduate fellowship then took Bayley to the State University of Iowa (now the University of Iowa) in Iowa City where she earned her doctoral degree in 1926. For her Ph.D. dissertation, Bayley used the newly invented galvanometer to measure electrical skin responses to fear in children. It was one of the first studies of its kind.
In 1926, as an instructor at the University of Wyoming, Bayley published the first of her nearly 200 contributions to the literature of psychology. Two years later, Harold Jones invited her to become a research associate at the Institute of Child Welfare (now the Institute of Human Development) at the University of California at Berkeley. Bayley was to remain there for most of her career. At Berkeley she met John R. Reid, a doctoral candidate in philosophy. They married in 1929, and Reid joined Bayley at the Institute. While at Berkeley, Bayley taught a course on developmental assessment of infants and small children in the Department of Psychology and held concurrent research positions in psychology and anatomy at Stanford University.
Taken from : The Gale Encyclopedia Of Psychology 2ND Edition - Bonnie Strickland
