ABSTRACT
The behavioral sciences commitment to mental retardation began in earnest after World War II. The preceding years had witnessed only scattered, nonsystematic research efforts, most of which had been in the psychometric tradition—the development of tests, intercorrelations of tests, measures to detect “organicity,” and the like. Few of these studies had the earmarks of experimental psychology, including experimental designs in which variables are manipulated; the study of topics such as learning, memory, discrimination, transfer, or perception; and rigorous quantitative methods. McPherson (1948) found only nine laboratory studies on learning in the retarded during the period 1904 to 1948. In a review covering the next decade, she uncovered 14 additional studies (McPherson, 1958). Behavioral theories fared little better. Most of the literature described comparative studies contrasting retarded persons with normal persons, or retarded persons of differing IQ or MA levels. A few studies tested theories from general psychology, merely using retarded persons as convenient organisms. A notable exception is Kounin's work (1941a, b), in which Lewin's Theory (1936) was applied to the retarded and the “Kounin-Lewin theory” about the behavior of the retarded was developed. Perhaps, the position of Strauss and his associates (see Strauss & Lehtinen, 1947) could be described as a theory developed, in part, about retarded children. Before the 1950s, however, both research and theory pertaining to the behavior of retarded persons were scarce.
