Mental tests and heredity : including a survey of nonverbal tests / by Barbara Schieffelin and Gladys C. Schwesinger.

  • Schieffelin, Barbara
Date:
1930
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Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Mental tests and heredity : including a survey of nonverbal tests / by Barbara Schieffelin and Gladys C. Schwesinger. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    TESTS OF INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES î finally rejected specific tests of such processes as memory, mental imagery, attention, and the like, because he did not believe that they tested the assumed functions. He concluded that one cannot say of an individual He has a good memory or He is mentally quick; one must specify in what mental per- formances he is quick or slow, or of which \ind of memory we speak,— whether it is for digits or letters arranged in a certain way, abstract things or concrete things. [See Peterson ('26) ]. Binet and his co'worker Simon ('05) finally decided that, since it was impossible to disentangle the various intellectual processes, their combined functional capacity must be tested, with no pretense at measuring the exact contribution of each to the total product. Terman ('16) concludes an account of Binet's work with the statement: It is hardly too much to say that intelligence tests have been successful just to the extent to which they have been guided by this principle. Binet's contributions are too well known and have been described too often to necessitate full treatment here. Mere mention must be made of his work with feebleminded and bright children ('99), his concept of general intelligence, his brilliant recognition of the value of common experience as a basis for intelli' gence tests, and, with Simon, his pioneer work in developing a mental age scale with yearly increments ('08). The history of the introduction of the Binet Scale into America, and of its various revisions, resulting from the controversy that ensued over its validity, is _ also far too long and complex to be discussed here. [See LíüteV Bobertag ('09), Decroly and Degand ('10), Binet ('11), DeVßloPifieittS Goddard ('11), Kuhlman ('12), and Terman et al ('12 and '16) ]. Two studies should be singled out for mention, however—those of Ayres ('11) and Strong ('13) —because they were among the first to note that some of the Binet items did depend on recent environmental experience. Three other important developments in the history of tests must be noted in passing: (1) Spearman's psychology of cognition, supplemented by certain statisti' cal devices which he invented; (2) the group tests constructed to answer the demand for psychological measurements in the United States Army; and (3) the spread of the testing movement in educational and clinical psychology. For adequate accounts of these, one must tum to special articles or historical surveys. (See K. Young ('24), Pintner ('23), Part I, and Freeman ('26), Chapters 6 and 7). Present-day group tests (a group as against an individual test being one which can be given to more than a single subject at the same time) are composed of various sub-tests. Chief among these is the test known as Completion of Complex Forms, which Ebbinghaus devised Sub-tests In in 1879. This test, according to Terman and Childs ('12) Group Scales requires the subject to relate given fragments (usually of a sentence; sometimes of pictures) into a meaningful whole. It is so highly thought of that Colvin ('22) calls it the most important intelli' gence test contributed by psychologists for determining individual differences. A second important type of test is the analogy. Here the examinee is given a series of three words or pictures to which he must add a fourth bearing the same relation to the third as the second does to the first. Analogies can be classified