KU News Release

KU research institute commemorates 50 years of ‘doing science and doing good’

Richard Schiefelbusch with Kennedy's Special Assistant on Mental Retardation, Dr. Stafford Warren in Washington in November 1963.

From left: Richard Schiefelbusch, Ross Copeland and Dr. H.V. Bair shown in a Parsons Sun story from November 12, 1966, on the impending Bureau's three-campus Mental Retardation Research Center that was ultimately inaugurated on June 14, 1972.

At Parsons State Hospital, the Bureau developed an intensive training program, which becanme known as the Mimosa Cottage Project, that prepared young women with moderate to severe retardation to live and work in the world.

LAWRENCE — The Schiefelbusch Institute for Life Span Studies is celebrating the 50th anniversary of its modern era.

The institute traces its origins back to a 1921 statute that established a “bureau of child research for the purpose of studying the problems of child life of the state.”

“We mark our modern era from 1956 when Dick Schiefelbusch was given two rooms, a part-time secretary and the charge to bring to life an entity that existed in name only,” said Steven Warren, director of the institute since 2001.

That name was the Bureau of Child Research, and it became known around the world for its groundbreaking research in human development and disability.

As the Bureau of Child Research, the first research project was initiated at Parsons State Hospital and Training Center in 1958. This project went on to prove that people with even profound mental retardation could learn.

This opened up possibilities. One of these was the full-scale demonstration project, Mimosa Cottage, which showed that individuals with mental retardation could live and work in the community. Next came Juniper Gardens Children’s Project in Kansas City, Kan. KU behavioral psychologists — called some of the best in the country by Psychology Today in 1972 — took their science out of controlled environments and into the distressed urban core in schools and homes to address why so many children failed academically. They also took on other social problems and showed results in scientifically meaningful ways.

Several revolutionary interventions for education and behavior management were developed by early members of the then-Bureau of Child Research. These included “time out,” perhaps the most widely used behavior management technique in the world, and the “good behavior game,” which is also widely used and has been described as a behavioral vaccine because of its power to prevent behavior problems.

Other techniques were developed early on to teach communication skills to children with moderate to severe retardation, to enhance the language development of at-risk preschool children and perhaps most important, to enhance the generalization and use of a wide range of newly taught skills and abilities.

Other research established techniques to treat severe aberrant behavior and to enhance the academic instruction of children at high-risk for mild mental retardation and school failure. Incidental language teaching, one of the most effective and widely used approaches to language intervention, was first conceived and tested by Betty Hart and Todd Risley. Their landmark study on the role of early parenting on the language development of young American children described in Meaningful Differences in the Experiences of Young American Children (1995) is still cited widely in the scientific world and by policymakers, pundits and the media, most recently in the July 23 New York Times.

In recent years, the Institute has increasingly diversified its portfolio to include neuroscientists such as:

— Steve Barlow and John Colombo, who are collaborating on the Actifer project, a computerized pacifier that helps incubated and other at-risk premature infants learn to suck, possibly preventing brain damage, that has garnered national attention in the media and the scientific world.
— Mabel Rice and her colleagues developed for market the first test for speech pathologists to detect Specific Language Impairment. Susan Kemper contributed to the famous University of Kentucky Nun Study that linked nuns’ early writings and later diagnoses of Alzheimer Disease. Charles Greenwood has developed a Web-based program that allows Early Head Start staff in Kansas and Missouri to identify problems in children’s language development.
— Amy McCart and Wayne Sailor have lead several schools in Kansas City to dramatically reduce behavior problems. McCart is collaborating with a software development company to develop a Web-based program that will help educators get specific research-based recommendations to solve individual student’s behavior problems.
— Steve Warren and Judy Carta are involved in a multi-city study of preventing child abuse and neglect.

Today, the Life Span Institute’s 12 affiliated centers have 110 programs and projects that are collaborations across scientific and geographic boundaries, producing technology, practices and products. Last year more than 39,000 Kansans benefited from the institute’s direct services, training and technical assistance, including its Assistive Technology for Kansans program.

“Our mission is really about inventing the future,” said Warren. “Not simply reacting to what comes along, but turning knowledge we create into solutions that will impact the quality of life for generations to come.”

A history of the institute, Doing science and doing good: A history of the Bureau of Child Research and the Schiefelbusch Institute for Life Span Studies, published by Paul H. Brookes, will be launched during institute anniversary events with a book signing by its editors, Richard Schiefelbusch, Stephen Schroeder and Joseph Spradlin, and will be available for sale in Oread Books in the Kansas Union.

The 12 centers of the Life Span Institute are the Kansas Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities Research Center, the Kansas University Center on Developmental Disabilities, the Life Span Institute at Parsons, the Juniper Gardens Children’s Project, the Beach Center on Disability, the Research and Training Center on Independent Living, the Gerontology Center, the Child Language Doctoral Program, the Biobehavioral Neurosciences in Communications Disorders Center the Merrill Advanced Studies Center, the Work Group on Health Promotion and Community Development and the Center for Physical Activity and Weight Management.

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