Cornell Department of Human Development

[1] The department emphasized an ecological perspective of human development that examined social, cultural, biological, and psychological processes and mechanisms of growth and change throughout the life cycle and across diverse contexts.

Many significant social science scholars of the 20th and 21st century, including Urie Bronfenbrenner (ecological systems theory, co-founder of Head Start) and Kurt Lewin (group dynamics, organizational development), were among the department's faculty.

A number of the department's graduate students became significant figures in the social sciences with their work tending toward interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary approaches.

[3] Funding from the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial, which was part of a mission by the Rockefeller Foundation to promote social science research and improve child welfare, provided the department with resources to create a laboratory nursery school in which faculty and students conducted empirical research observing the behavior of children and parents.

Its study of contextual influences had expanded beyond the family to a variety of contexts, including peer groups, schools, neighborhoods, and workplaces, in part due to Bronfenbrenner's theoretical work.

Its mission to conduct interdisciplinary and integrative developmental science to understand the growing person in a changing world was carried out in three interrelated core areas - Law and Human Development, Health and Well-being, and Cognition in Context - that were problem-centered and organized around real-world issues.

Some of its signal contributions – such as the creation of Head Start or the launch of the child-witness field – were the result of research syntheses across many of the social sciences as well as medicine, nutrition, and law.

In the 1930s, faculty such as Ethel Waring translated data from empirical studies conducted in the laboratory nursery school in extension bulletins aimed at informing parents on the best child rearing practices.

[4][10] Faculty have served on federal panels and provided policy recommendations to government agencies, including Bronfenbrenner's work in establishing the Head Start program.