The article, “Myrtle B. Mcgraw: A Growth Scientist” is a collaboration of three authors who have compiled information about her life and career from multiple archival sources. The article is well written and organized effectively to introduce Mcgraw through voluminous background information about her life and her career, followed by subsections about her growth studies, and the impact of her life’s work on contemporary research in motor development. The authors aims to defend Mcgraw as a pioneer of motor development, to describe the nature of her research while clarifying concepts, to examine the controversy surrounding her studies, and to suggest teamwork of several disciplines in order to advance research in growth science studies.
Myrtle Mcgraw was a product of the Gesell era with a sixty year career during the mid nineteenth century. Most researchers of the time were maturationists, and theorized that behavioral acquisition and motor development was an unfolding of largely inherited behaviors driven by genetics, without environmental influence, and learning was ignored. Mcgraw started her career by studying the normal development of children, followed by cotwin studies, and then continued to further research on
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Her theories and research are misunderstood due to unclear objectives and methods, and the authors aim to summarize and explain her impact, and encourage interdisciplinary collaboration to advance motor development research. Mcgraw was working across multiple fields herself validating that the more the fields overlapped, and shared information, the more could be learned. The impact of her career can be adequately summarized through this thorough analyses done by Bergann, et. al, and conclude with the suggestion for interdisciplinary collaboration for further advances in growth