ABSTRACT
Martha Muchow’s teacher, William Stern, was without doubt one of the great promoters of pedagogical reform and empirical research in education. He made important contributions to establishing educational psychology as a scientific discipline. William Stern’s well-established collaboration with the Hamburg Teachers Association, as well as his experimental studies and innovative work in the area of personal and differential psychology, made him the preferred candidate in Hamburg. The situation of public demands for educational and developmental research that Stern encountered in Hamburg was quite comparable to the situation of another similar leading research center in Europe, the Vienna Institute. Martha Muchow, as a student at the Laboratorium, was chosen by Stern as early as 1917 to work with him. Her first scientific activity, which required her to prepare guidelines for a questionnaire to be used by teachers in selecting gifted children, was unpaid.
