[2] In 1932, she was appointed as a lecturer in the Zoology Department at University of Birmingham, and during World War II was promoted to acting head.
Among her work to popularise science was the New Biology journal aimed at young people published by Penguin Books from 1945 until 1960.
Abercrombie then was appointed as Reader in Architectural Education at the Bartlett School in University College and able to take full control of her research and teaching.
Abercrombie found that group discussion helped these students solve such problems and, in particular, improved the ability of the students to discriminate between facts and opinions, to resist false conclusions and to bring fresh strategies to their attempts to solve new problems without being adversely influenced by past failure.
The ideas she put forward about the development of small group interactive learning pedagogies in the 1960s in the UK had an almost immediate impact on the primary and tertiary education.
Her Anatomy of Judgement: an investigation into the process of perception and reasoning[5] resulted from ten years of research on the selection and training of medical students at University College London.
Her finding was that group discussion, properly directed, could do much to eliminate faults in the teacher and to make the student think instead of learning.
She progressively developed her research and thinking from her early years as a zoology teacher through her growing involvement in Group Analysis and its application in education.
Throughout her work, three themes – the selective and projective nature of perception and reasoning; the difficulty that human beings experience in changing; the subtlety and complexity of communication – continually interact with and enrich one another.
The first gives an overview of the development of her research and thinking from her early years as a zoology teacher to her growing involvement in group analysis and its application in education.
The second part illustrates the way in which, throughout her work, three themes interact: the selective and projective nature of perception and reasoning; the difficulty that human beings experience in changing; the subtlety and complexity of communication.
(Abercrombie, 1960) Our methods of formal education are still governed by a notion that children's little heads are empty, or at least emptier than they should be, whereas the truth is that it is because they are too full of what we do not understand that they are difficult to teach.