William Nathan Schoenfeld (1915-1996): innovative scientist, inspiring teacher, relentless questioner, complicated man.

This paper is a memorial tribute to William N. Schoenfeld. It tells the story of a man who helped build behavior analysis from the ground up.

The author paints a picture of Schoenfeld as a teacher who never stopped asking hard questions. He pushed students to think like scientists every day.

Schoenfeld’s biggest gift was his endless curiosity. He treated every client, student, and data point as a puzzle to solve.

His classes were famous for one simple rule: prove it. Students had to show, with data, why they believed anything.

Bennett et al. (1973) and Lowe et al. (1974) show the kind of tight single-case work Schoenfeld demanded. Those studies rotate trainers and use sitting as reinforcement—exactly the creative, data-driven moves he taught.

Jenkins et al. (2016) updates his teacher side. They prove one rehearsal plus feedback is enough for staff to run functional analyses with near-perfect integrity. It is the modern, faster version of Schoenfeld’s “prove it” standard.

Gilroy et al. (2022) sounds like bad news: caregivers still pick fad treatments over parent training. Yet this clash pushes us toward Schoenfeld’s real goal—use data on consumer demand, not just lab data, to win the field.

Schoenfeld’s legacy is a daily habit: ask, test, revise. When you write a program, run one quick probe first. When a caregiver wants a non-science option, show the data on what actually works. Keep the question alive.