Special talents and defects : $b Their significance for educationHollingworth, Leta Stetter
Science
Special talents and defects : $b Their significance for education
Hollingworth, Leta Stetter
Educational psychology; Educational tests and measurements; Exceptional children
In securing the control of visual perception and imagery, it is well to
have the child write slowly and carefully from a copy, not being allowed
for some time to write spontaneously. At first, particularly, the
teacher may guide the child’s hands and urge him to notice in detail how
another writes. Of course, the best educational treatment is that which
never permits the development of the habit in the first place. This
could be accomplished by careful watching of all left-handed children,
at the very beginning of their attempts to learn to write. As each
letter and figure is taught for the first time, the child whose natural
impulse is to reverse it could be made conscious of his error, and could
be drilled in the coördinations of hand and eye which produce the
correct response. In the very large beginners’ classes which are
customary in the public schools, such careful attention to the needs of
individuals is here, as in other respects, difficult to give.
IV. MECHANICAL ABILITY
In 1915 Stenquist, Thorndike, and Trabue, working with dependent
children in a county of New York State, used tests of various mental
functions, including a test of ability to put simple mechanisms
together. These correlations showed that whereas tests of ability to
handle language and tests of general intelligence (Binet-Simon) gave
positive coefficients as high as .90, the test of mechanical ability
yielded a coefficient much lower, when correlated with these. They
therefore suggested that mechanical ingenuity might be a relatively
specialized form of capacity, not reliably predictable from knowledge of
general intelligence.
Subsequently, one of these investigators, Stenquist, made extended
tests, and standardized a measuring scale to gauge mechanical ability.
Measuring individuals for general intelligence and for mechanical
ability, a positive coefficient of correlation amounting to about .40 is
ordinarily obtained. This relationship is obviously not close. Ability
to put mechanisms together is not reliably predictable from status in
general intelligence. The chances are, however, that a pupil who is
superior in general intelligence will score higher in mechanical
ability, than a generally stupid pupil will score. There is no negative
or compensatory relation between the two functions, as is sometimes
assumed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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