Measure Your Mind: The Mentimeter and How to Use ItTrabue, Marion Rex
Science
Measure Your Mind: The Mentimeter and How to Use It
Trabue, Marion Rex
Educational tests and measurements; Intelligence tests; Psychological tests
Previous Form Series Completion tests have required the candidate to
fill in the last characters of each line, everything being printed in
order up to within a few sections of the end. The present form, in which
the elisions are distributed through the series rather than being
grouped at the end, has the advantage that it may be made more difficult
by far than the previous forms. Although this test probably measures a
rather specialized type of intellectual ability, it is nevertheless
sufficiently well graduated in difficulty so that the result obtained by
it will show a close relationship to the result obtained in other more
general tests.
The problem of the candidate who is given this test is chiefly that of
solving, from the rather meagre data presented, just what the serial
order of the different forms may be. This undoubtedly calls for a
complex variety of special mental qualities, including imagination and
abstract reasoning ability. Nevertheless, it is hardly possible for the
authors to make any sort of estimate of just where this test will be
most valuable or just what it measures. It will certainly be interesting
and entertaining whether it works out to have any particular usefulness
or not.
_Directions for Giving the Test._
The candidate should be seated at the left of the examiner in order that
he may conveniently work upon the test booklet which should be placed on
a table between them. After filling out for the candidate the
information blanks giving name, age, and the like, the examiner should
show for fifteen or twenty seconds (not more than 20 seconds) the inside
of the booklet. He should then turn back to the title page and
demonstrate the nature of the test by means of the examples printed
there.
[Illustration]
Probably the best and most effective method of demonstration is that of
“jumping” the pencil rhythmically from one block to the next
corresponding one to show the rhythmic sequence of the same symbols.
When a block is reached in which the symbol has been omitted (but in
which the samples have been crudely marked with a fine pen), the
examiner should make an appropriate heavy mark such as is used in the
printed sections of each series. After any symbol has been written on
the explanation samples it would be very much worth while to skip
rhythmically along the line making certain that the sequence is
correctly followed. When it seems fairly certain that the candidate has
grasped the rhythmic nature of the forms, the examiner should open the
booklet, give him a pencil, and say “Put them in.” “Fix it up.” “Go
ahead.”
Allow exactly five minutes for this work. At the end of this time the
examiner should take the paper and score it as directed below.
_Directions for Scoring the Test._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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