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
We are not interested in determining a divisor for an adult intelligence
quotient but in fixing a conservative borderline for the mature.
Admitting that the mental capacity of those 15-year-olds at the lower
limit may not be like adults, nevertheless adults would be more likely
to be better than worse. Borderlines for the 15-year-olds, should,
therefore, be safe for adults. Moreover, the lower limits with a truly
random group of 15-year-olds would probably be more reliable than an
assorted group of adults subjectively chosen from different walks in
life and combined in an effort to represent a random mature group. The
Stanford Scale utilizes such combination of selected adults. It seems,
therefore, that we are justified in utilizing the lowest percentages of
randomly selected 15-year-olds as a reasonable criterion for describing
the limits for adult deficiency. Surely adults below this lower limit
for 15-year-olds would have questionable intellectual capacity.
The borderline for the mature being the crucial feature of a
developmental scale when used for detecting feeble-mindedness, it seemed
imperative to us that some effort should be made to obtain records with
a random group of older-age children or adults. Goddard's results with
school children were not significant above eleven years of age since the
personal examinations were confined to children in the sixth grade or
below. The twelve year old group in the sixth grade clearly omits the
best 12-year-olds, so that the percentage method would have no
significance applied to his figures for children above 11 years of age.
Moreover it was obvious that the group of _public school_ children 15
years of age or older would not give a picture of the lower end of a
random group since many children drop out of school at 14. On the
average those that leave are undoubtedly of lower ability than those who
remain.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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