ABSTRACT
G. Stanley Hall's child study questionnaires were designed to offer guidance for child study, and to serve as a basis for a cooperative naturalism of child development. Hall hoped questionnaire studies would provide a scientific foundation for education, and he founded the Pedagogical Seminary as an outlet for the work. The child development movement of the 1920s and 1930s centered its research work on psychometric and normative studies of children that, it was hoped, would provide quantitative indications of a range of healthy, normal child development. The issue of articulating an appropriate philosophy of science for psychology arose first in experimental psychology in the 1920s, because of changes in the work and scientific programs of experimental psychology amounting to what some called a crisis. Developmental science stood to the side. Experimental psychology had been the best-known activity of the New Psychology in America and experimental psychologists dominated the laboratories and departments of the nascent discipline.
