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
For the purpose of assisting the reader in keeping and interpreting
records of the Mentimeter tests, the authors have prepared a record
booklet which may be used with the tests to excellent advantage. It
will be found economical to use this booklet because of the guide
lines, headings, and practical suggestions which it contains, reducing
copying and memory work in the calculations to a minimum. It is
recommended also that calculating tables or a slide rule be used to
calculate the percentages called for in the final column of the
distribution tables. Such aids are very desirable because of their
contribution to the accuracy of results and to economy of time.
Assuming now that the reader has a fairly clear idea of how to
administer and record the results of the Mentimeter tests, the next
question to be answered is: “What shall be done about these test
records?” Measurement in any field does not change to any appreciable
degree the material which has been measured. The surveyor, for example,
who measures the area of a field makes very little impression upon the
soil over which he passes. A physician who measures the weight of an
infant does not thereby increase that weight or diminish it. In the same
way the psychologist who applies a Mentimeter test to a filing clerk,
does not by that act increase the efficiency of that clerk.
Measurements, of themselves, are of no value. Something must be done
about the result which is obtained or all of the expense in time and
money is of no avail.
The real purpose of a measurement is to tell facts about a situation
more exactly and with greater objectiveness than they could be told in a
description. A child may seem, on first appearance, to be under weight,
but in order to know definitely whether or not that is true it is
necessary to measure his age in terms of years, months, and days, to
measure his weight in terms of pounds and ounces, and to measure his
height in terms of feet and inches. All of these measurements taken
together, however, will not hinder the child’s growth or make him
develop more rapidly; they merely indicate what his present condition
is, without reference to what it may have been in the past or what it
may become in the future.
As a sample of the great benefit which may be obtained from knowing
mental facts exactly, we may consider the traditions and present status
of our public school systems. Education has in the past been pointed,
from the very beginning in the kindergarten toward the high school and
the college and ultimately the professional school in which lawyers,
physicians, ministers, and teachers were to be prepared. The child who
by nature was not inclined toward the consideration of abstract ideas
and theories soon found that the schools were not well adapted to his
interests.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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