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
Having chosen certain promising tests for experiment, having proved the
validity of these tests by checking up the relation of their results to
the true abilities of a group of old employees or persons whose relative
capacities are known perfectly, and having selected those tests whose
results relate most directly to intellectual ability and least directly
to one another, one may begin to employ the tests thus selected for the
sorting and classification of new recruits or applicants. The question
which will at once confront the reader who is not experienced in the
employment of statistics of this sort is “How shall the test results be
recorded and interpreted?”
The answer to the question regarding test records is that the exact
score of each person should be kept for each test to which that person
is “exposed.” One difficulty with the records kept of certain other
group intelligence tests is that only the final total score is retained,
while all the wealth of detail furnished by the different tests included
in the series is lost. The total score on a series of six or eight
intelligence tests is worth keeping, but the separate scores on each of
the six or eight may prove to be even more illuminating than the total
score. Two candidates may make the same total score on a series of tests
but the one may make his points chiefly in memory tests with little help
from the tests calling for complex thought, while the other may do very
poorly in the memory work and very well in the thought tests. If only
the total score on the series were retained, the usefulness of the
series would be practically destroyed for many purposes.
For the interpretation of the result recorded on any test, one will need
to use some short but intelligible scheme for stating the true relation
of the score of any individual to the scores of the remainder of his
group or to the scores of the other group of old employees used as a
standard in selecting the tests to be regularly employed. It is not
always safe to say merely that Mr. K—— is below the average of his
group. As an extreme case of how unjust this might be, let us suppose
that in one of the Mentimeter tests, A made a score of 0; B made a score
of 2; C, a score of 1; D, 2; E, 3; F, 0; G, 10; H, 2; I, 3; J, 9; and K,
3. The average score of this small group, obtained by adding the eleven
scores and dividing by 11, is 3.18. Mr. K—— therefore obtained a score
which was below the average of the group, even though fewer than 20 per
cent. of his group made better scores than he. _The average score is too
much influenced by extremely low or extremely high scores._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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