The abilities of man : their nature and measurement / by C. Spearman.

  • Charles Spearman
Date:
1927
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The abilities of man : their nature and measurement / by C. Spearman. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    proved to be correlated with teachers’ estimates to the large amount of -70 (easily surpassing the Binet-Simon series, which was tried at the same time).1 More recently, Burt has joined it together with four others, the well-known Opposites, the Analogies (invented by himself),2 Mixed Sen¬ tences,3 and Completion (p. 185) into a series called the National Institute Group Test. On this series being tried out by Dobson, the Reasoning seemed to be the weakest of the five ; but subsequently with McCrae it appeared to be the best, its correlation with g rising this time to -86.4 The preceding investigations, however, had not aimed at the same problem as occupies us now ; and the results—for various reasons which we shall see later on—are not very conclusive for our special purpose. This lack induced the present writer, in collaboration with Mr. Dockerill and others,5 to carry out some experiments with the express intention of comparing different relations with one another. To 114 children, about 12-13 years of age, were applied eleven tests of the following description. Three were directed to bring into play the relation of likeness. Two did the same for that of evidence. Five others had a mixed character, but especially avoided the relations of conjunction, of space, and of time. The remaining test was one of memory. The correlations with g are given on the following page. Examples of each kind are added in a footnote. From this list, the main impression one gets is that the differences of kind of relation have a surprisingly small effect on the amount of correlation with g. Relations of conjunction, space, and time. Turning to the three classes of relation that had been specially omitted from the preceding investigation, these are distinguished by their prominence in mathematics. That of conjunction, as men¬ tioned before, supplies the basis of arithmetic. Usually it 1 Mental and Scholastic Tests, 1921. 2 Journ. Exper. Pedag. 1911. 3 The words of a sentence are mixed randomly, and the subject has to re-arrange them in proper order. 4 Loc. cit. p. 163. 5 Especially Miss Buysman, Miss Bones, Mr. Fennings, and Mrs. Spittle.
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