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
Two hundred and twelve men took Series I. Both the average and median
were 66 on the basis of 100 as a maximum score. One hundred and
seventy-eight men, all of whom had taken Series I, took Series II. It
was administered after the students had begun military training of a
rigorous nature and when they were far from fresh. The composite score
of Series I and Series II, made from the records of one hundred and
seventy-eight men who had taken both tests, showed that the Brown
University Series proved as good as a measure of scholastic standing as
did the Army test for military fitness.
Prof. Stephen S. Colvin, of Brown University, writing on these
psychological tests, says that in addition to the evidence obtained by
correlating the test results and the students’ academic marks, as to the
relation between the scores of the psychological tests and academic
standing, there is further indication that the psychological tests
proved of considerable value in showing the probable success of a
student in his academic work.
During the first half of the year, eighty students were reported as
doing unsatisfactory work. Of these eighty students, thirteen had
received a score of “good” or “very good” in the psychological tests;
fourteen had received an average score: while in the cases of
fifty-three the score was either “poor,” or “very poor.” During the
second term, thirty-four men were reported as doing considerably above
average grade. Of those thus reported, five ranked “superior” in their
psychological tests; nineteen “very good”; seven “good”; two “average”;
and one “poor.”
Interesting results were noted in intelligence tests at the University
of Illinois on March 6, 1919, when nearly 3,500 students, who were
distributed in twenty-four different halls, were examined
simultaneously. The Army test (Alpha) was used. Various members of the
faculty, including deans, volunteered for special preparatory training
to act as examiners and alternate examiners. It was an interesting
spectacle to witness eminent men voluntarily in the rôle of students and
being “tested.”
In a summary of the results of the tests, Dr. David Spence Hill says:
“_The smallness_ of difference between median scores of classes within
each college of the large groups of students _is insignificant_. As
between freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors the extreme
difference was less than 2 per cent. in the college of literature, arts
and sciences; less than 4 per cent. in the colleges of engineering, and
of agriculture; about 5 per cent. in the colleges of commerce, and less
than 3 per cent. in the three years of the graduate school. Differences
as small as these are safely to be accounted for by chance or by
variations of one kind and another.”
The report of the value as a whole of the intelligence test, signed by
members of the University staff, says, in part:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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