for Behavioral Studies
"A peaceful, natural death, as he was getting ready for another day. A life well lived to the very last moment," wrote Bob and Jude Bijou of their father, Sidney W. Bijou, pioneer in behavioral and developmental psychology, early childhood education, and research administration. He passed away on June 11, 2009, at age 100 in Santa Barbara, CA.
Sid was born on November 12, 1908 in Arlington, MD, and, at age ten, moved with his family to Brooklyn, NY. After graduating from the University of Florida in 1933 in business administration, he returned to New York, where he married Janet Rose Tobias and entered Columbia University’s masters program in psychology, from which earned a degree with an emphasis in intellectual disabilities. In clinical work with Joseph Jastak in Delaware, they developed the acclaimed Wide Range Achievement Test. With an emerging interest in child development, Sid entered the doctoral program in psychology at the University of Iowa, but completed his degree in animal behavior with Kenneth W. Spence for research on the synthesis of neuroses in rats. He moved next to a clinical position at the Wayne County Training School (Northville, MI), but soon took a leave to serve in the Army Air Corps during World War II, where he directed its Convalescent Branch for the Surgeon General. In 1946, he was recruited by B. F. Skinner to Indiana University (Bloomington, IN) as an assistant professor of psychology and the department’s director of clinical training.
Given an opportunity to direct the Institute for Child Development at the University of Washington (Seattle, WA), however, Sid joined that university’s psychology department in 1948. Over the next dozen years, he developed a training program for basic research on typical and atypical child behavior that was increasingly informed by Skinner’s science of behavior and then funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). In the process, he founded a behavioral approach to development, writing seminal books with Donald M. Baer.
On sabbatical leave at Harvard for the 1961-1962 academic year, Sid surveyed the northeast’s education and training programs for children with intellectual disabilities, but came away disappointed. He returned to Washington, vowing to do better. He did. He and Jay S. Birnbrauer established an experimental classroom at Washington’s Rainier State School that was funded by the U.S. Office of Education. He and his colleagues conducted pioneering research on programmed instruction (e.g., the Edmark Reading Program), developed classroom token economies, and refined time-out procedures.
In preschool classrooms at the Institute, his colleague, Montrose M. Wolf, was the first to demonstrate systematically the power of teacher attention to improve children’s motor, social, and emotional development. And, at a state psychiatric facility, Wolf, Todd R. Risley, and Hayden L. Mees applied Skinner’s science (e.g., reinforcement, shaping) to the chronic aberrant behavior of a young boy with autism – “Dicky.” Applications such as this became known as applied behavior analysis. Today, they are the best empirically supported treatments for autism.
As a research administrator for all the foregoing, Sid established Washington as a top-flight research center for the application of behavior analysis to a myriad of childhood problems. In 1965, he moved to the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign, IL) as a professor of psychology and of education, where he made similar contributions. He directed an NIMH-supported Child Behavior Laboratory for children with developmental disabilities and a training grant for graduate students from the National Institute of Child Health and Development. He refined and extended his work at Washington, especially in applied behavior analysis. Indeed, in 1968, his colleagues -- Baer, Wolf, and Risley – founded the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis at the University of Kansas, establishing applied behavior analysis as a sub-discipline of the burgeoning field of behavior analysis. Sid continued to advance the field’s research methods and apply behavior analysis to early childhood education and parent training, and then to higher education (i.e., personalized systems of instruction), as well as publish more texts on the behavior-analytic approach to child development.
In 1975, Sid retired from Illinois, but remained fully engaged in teaching, research, and service for then next quarter century, first in psychology and special education at the University of Arizona (1975-1993) and then at the University of Nevada-Reno (1993-2001), where he helped found the behavior analysis program in the psychology department.
Throughout his career, Sid was active in professional service, for instance, in committee and division work for the American Psychological Association (APA) and the Society for Research in Child Development. He was on the organizing committee of what would become the Association for Behavior Analysis (ABA, est. 1975), to which he was elected its third president. He was the first editor of the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology. He was highly regarded as a consultant by funding agencies (e.g., NIMH) and clinical programs (e.g., the Portage Project) and as a task force chairperson and member (e.g., APA’s 1974 Commission on Behavior Modification). And, he was renowned for his international dissemination of behavior analysis in Mexico and South America, continental Europe, and Japan (e.g., the Anne Sullivan Center, Lima, Peru).
Sid earned many awards and honors throughout his career, among them research awards from the American Association on Mental Deficiency and the American Academy of Mental Retardation; the G. Stanley Hall, Edgar A. Doll, and Don Hake awards from three divisions of APA; ABA’s award for the International Development of Behavior Analysis; and the Distinguished Service to Behavior Analysis Award from the Society for the Advancement of Behavior Analysis. In 1974, his colleagues and students celebrated his lifetime contributions, to that point in his career, with festschrift.
After Janet passed away in 2000, Sid moved to Santa Barbara to live with Jude and be closer to Bob. He remained professionally influential to the end, however, corresponding with and receiving visits from colleagues and former students, historians of psychology, and scholars who sought out his sage advice. His was a long good life, well lived.
Author’s Note: This is a press release prepared by Edward K. Morris, with the approval of Jude and Bob Bijou, the daughter and son of Sidney W. Bijou. Correspondence may be sent to the Department of Applied Behavioral Science, 4001 Dole Human Development Center, University of Kansas, 1000 Sunnyside Avenue, Lawrence, KS 66045-2133 Phone: 785-864-4840; fax: 785-864-5202; e-mail: ekm@ku.edu.
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