Deficiency and Delinquency: An Interpretation of Mental TestingMiner, James Burt
Science
Deficiency and Delinquency: An Interpretation of Mental Testing
Miner, James Burt
Children with mental disabilities; Juvenile delinquents; Mentally ill offenders; Psychological tests
In Fig. 7 curve H includes Gilbert's visual reaction time,
Norsworthy's A and a-t tests, Carpenter's two A tests; curve I
includes Gilbert's and Smedley's tapping tests; curve J is the
median of the central tendencies of all 40 tests; curve K includes
Norsworthy's two opposites and her part-whole and genus-species
tests, the Pyle opposites, genus-species and part-whole tests; curve
L is the same as D, curve M includes Smedley's strength of grip and
ergograph tests and Gilbert's fatigue of tapping; curve N includes
Pyle and Anderson's word building tests and Pyle's uncontrolled word
association test.
In Fig. 8 curve P is Gilbert's visual reaction time test, curve S is
Norsworthy's test for memory of unrelated words, the other curves
are the median and quartiles for the central tendencies of all 40
tests after each was expressed at each age in terms of the gain from
8 to 9 years taken as a unit.
Several points are to be noted about the nature of the curves for
different tests. In Fig. 6 showing the curves for different forms of
memory tests, that for the memory of digits is very different in
character from that for memory of related material. The most extreme
differences in the time of maturity are shown by the test for memory for
digits presented orally and the substitution of color in forms, the
former continues to increase so rapidly relative to the absolute
increase from 8 to 9 years that it cannot be represented in the graph
reaching 539 units of the scale by 14 years of age, while improvement in
ability in the latter is not measured after 9 years. We cannot take time
to discuss how much of the differences between the various curves may be
due to the nature of the tests themselves, the form of scoring the
results, or the condition under which they were given, selection of
subjects, etc. The conclusion is safe, however, that when groups of
three or four tests of similar type show such marked differences as
those for memory of digits and memory for related material we may expect
similar differences in the rates of maturity of the corresponding
processes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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