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
The reader who is mathematically inclined may wish to find the median
point in the distribution, the point which bisects the distribution. To
find this, one needs to study his facts carefully and make such
assumptions as seem most probable for the facts which are not perfectly
apparent. For example, of the three persons who scored 2 points, one
individual may have had the third problem thought out and have been in
the very act of writing the correct answer to it when the time was up,
while another may have just finished problem two without having begun to
read the third problem, and the third person may have been right in the
middle of his thought about problem three. Not knowing what the exact
truth is, we may assume that of the three who had a score of 2, one’s
true score was between 2 and 2.33, another’s was between 2.33 and 2.66
and that the third’s was between 2.67 and 3.00.
If we count out the five who scored 3 or higher, we shall still require
half of the distance represented by the next highest individual in order
to have counted out 5.5 (half of 11). If our assumption is true, then,
we shall need to count half way down from 3.00 to 2.67 in order to find
the median point, 2.83. The calculation of the median point is not
necessary, however, unless there is a very large number of cases in the
distribution and unless very accurate comparisons must be made. In
passing it may be said that the calculation of the median point at 2.83
is just as sensible and just as accurate as the calculation of the
average point at 3.18, and that the median point is a much more useful
measure of the distribution than the more commonly used average.
The user of the Mentimeter tests will not, under ordinary circumstances,
be satisfied with interpreting an individual’s score merely by
indicating its direction from the median, mode or average of a group. It
will not usually be sufficient to say “He made the modal or most popular
score,” or “His score was lower than the average,” or even “His score
was higher than the median.” Some indication will be desired as to how
much better or poorer a given score is than the median, or just what
percentage of the standard group made better scores. An illustration of
the method to be employed in such calculations and a review of the
method of finding the median is given below in connection with a
distribution of scores on one of the Mentimeter tests. (See Mentimeter
No. 24, page 234.)
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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