At the Institute, Bayley began a major study of normal and handicapped infant development. It became famous as the Berkeley Growth Study. Her 1933 publication, The California First-year Mental Scale, was followed in 1936 by The California Infant Scale of Motor Development. In these works, Bayley introduced methodologies for assessing infant development. Likewise, her 1933 publication, Mental Growth During the First Three Years, became a milestone in developmental psychology. Bayley earned the G. Stanley Hall Award of the APA’s Division of Developmental Psychology in 1971.
In 1954, Bayley became head of child development in the Laboratory of Psychology at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland. There she worked on the National Collaborative Perinatal Project, a study of 50,000 children from birth to age eight. The study examined neurological and psychological disorders, including cerebral palsy and mental retardation. The newly revised Bayley Mental and Motor Scales were used to assess the development of hundreds of children from one to eighteen months of age. Many surviving subjects of this study continued to participate in follow-up studies. Among her many findings, Bayley demonstrated that there were no sex-related differences in physical and mental development. She continued to work on this project after returning to Berkeley as the first head of the Harold E. Jones Child Study Center at the Institute of Human Development. She also acted as consultant on a study of infants with Down syndrome at the Sonoma State Hospital in California.
Taken from : The Gale Encyclopedia Of Psychology 2ND Edition - Bonnie Strickland
