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 distributed the scores obtained by a group of college graduates
on the Analogies test, the next important step toward their
interpretation is the totaling of the frequencies up to and including
those of each possible size, as shown in the third column of the
accompanying table. The fourth column is then prepared showing the
corresponding _percentages_ of the total number (129) of persons tested,
for each of the total frequencies shown in column III. The table as a
whole is then to be read from left to right. As an example, one may
begin at 20 in the first column and read as follows: “1 college graduate
made a score of exactly 20 points, making in all 7 individuals who
obtained a score of 20 points or less, which (7) is 5.4 per cent. of the
129 individuals tested.” Dropping the eye to the next percentage below
this line in column IV, one can interpret the score of the individual
who made a score of 20 as follows: “This is a poor showing for a college
graduate, for of 129 college graduates tested only 4.7 per cent. made a
lower score.”
A very popular method of interpreting a score is to tell in what quarter
or, as the statisticians would say, in what “quartile” of the
distribution a given score is found. The upper or first quartile of a
distribution is the range of scores below which 75 per cent. of those
tested have fallen. The second quartile is the range of scores below
which 50 per cent. are found but above which 25 per cent. of those
tested are found. The third quartile is the range below which only 25
per cent. are found and above which 50 per cent. are found, and the
fourth or lowest quartile is the range of scores in which are found the
lowest 25 per cent. of the scores made. The first and second quartiles
are above the median, while the third and fourth quartiles are below the
median. Obviously the individual who scored 20 points in the Analogies
test, and is included in the lowest 5.4 per cent. is also in the lowest
quartile of the college graduate scores. The point dividing the first
and second quartiles is called the 75 percentile, while the point
dividing the third and fourth quartiles is called the 25 percentile. As
was stated above, the median or 50 percentile divides the second and
third quartiles.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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