Bing Nursery celebrates 60 years of research

Since Bing Nursery School opened on Stanford campus 60 years ago, its mission has been “to serve as a joyful, engaging environment for children while advancing the scientific understanding of human development,” Director Jennifer Winters said in her opening remarks during a Saturday event celebrating the nursery’s anniversary. 

That scientific understanding comes in the form of roughly 22 research studies conducted at the nursery every year. These have included Walter Mischel’s “marshmallow experiments,” which studied delayed gratification in children, and Stanford Psychology professor Carol Dweck’s “growth mindset” studies, which investigated how a child’s mindset impacts their development.

Dweck, who spoke at Bing Nursery’s 60th anniversary event on Saturday, said, “I’d love to salute and thank the Bing school, not just for hosting our research, but for making it better so the resulting research is improved immeasurably.”

Allison Master Ph.D. ’11, who studied under Dweck as a Ph.D. student, traveled from San Diego to attend the anniversary event. She said her time at Bing was transformative. 

Master spent many hours at Bing researching how children’s beliefs about themselves impact their development and has continued to study the topic throughout her career. “I still get the Facebook memories popping up with the adorable things the kids would say,” Master said. 

Master’s experience is consistent with most research at Bing, which typically focuses on interactions with children aged two to five. Critically, children can decide whether to opt in to experiments, which are presented as games.

Program Director Beth Wise explained how the experiments are introduced to the children. “[Researchers] say, ‘Would you like to play a game in my game room?’ And my son, for example, said ‘no’ every single time. I don’t think he ever went. My daughter went all the time and then talked about it the whole way home. So in terms of that: ‘How does it impact children?’ Well, it’s so seamlessly woven in,” said Wise.

Children as “honored guests”

According to Wise, part of the secret behind what makes Bing’s research so successful is the quality of their education for young children. “[The nursery] has to be that good for research to be successful. If we’re going to have a large cohort for research, we have to have an exemplary program for young children,” said Wise. 

That quality of education means classes are full, with parents applying year-round for the chance for their child to learn at Bing. While application priority is given to Stanford affiliates, 25–30% of students are accepted from the general community, and 20% of students receive financial aid. 

Each classroom of roughly 36 students is supervised by at least six teachers. Students have access to both an indoor classroom space and a half acre of outdoor space since, as Winters noted, one of the cornerstones of their philosophy is to give children the freedom to play and explore. 

Mubarik Imam is the mother of three children, all of whom have attended Bing. She said she’s seen Bing impact her kids “tremendously” because of the “freedom of space, freedom of movement and freedom of time” the school affords its students. 

Looking to the past and future

Winters said that, for the most part, education at Bing hasn’t changed much over the last 60 years because children haven’t changed much. “We want to be very respectful of the child and their ideas,” Winters said. “The founding director said something that sort of sticks in everyone’s mind as teachers. She said, ‘We want to treat the child as an honored guest.’” Bing teachers continue to keep this lesson at the center of their work.

However, there have been some important adjustments over the years. Most importantly, they went through the books available to students to remove “things that were stereotypical” and sought to add books representing a variety of people and experiences. “You should be able to see yourself and you should be able to see someone else [in books]. We made sure we have books that everybody can pull out,” said Wise.

For Stanford undergraduates, Bing is also an opportunity to prepare for careers in medicine, research, clinical psychology and education, and can even help students learn to be a better parent one day, according to Winters. Undergraduates are often involved with research projects at Bing and can enroll in a number of courses designed to teach undergraduates how to connect with and design appropriate experiments about children. 

Winters said that “once [undergraduates have] taken those classes, it almost is a springboard for research because knowing how to interact with a young child takes some skill. And learning that skill — it’s life changing.”

The post Bing Nursery celebrates 60 years of research appeared first on The Stanford Daily.