The accomplishment ratio : $b A treatment of the inherited determinants of disparity in school productFranzen, Raymond
Science
The accomplishment ratio : $b A treatment of the inherited determinants of disparity in school product
Franzen, Raymond
Ability -- Testing; Educational psychology; Educational tests and measurements
As Garden City was a small school, adjustment of procedure to individual
differences in intelligence, besides the grouping for subject matter,
was done mostly by pushing children. Children were advanced whole years
(the grade they “belonged to” was the one in which geography and history
were taught; this was their home grade) besides the readjustment made
by the special regrading in reading and arithmetic. A special treatment
class was formed where pronounced negative deviates were given special
attention. Regrading was also instituted for spelling. Children were
promoted whenever it was considered advisable; teachers were switched
from subject to subject whenever that was considered advisable by the
principal and the author. The Thorndike _Arithmetics_ and other new texts
were introduced to some extent. _Any change possible was made in order
to bring EQ⁄IQ as high as possible._ That was the goal. The purpose
was not to prove that any certain educational procedure would tend to
promote abilities more rapidly than others, but that abilities could be
promoted to the level of intelligence—that intelligence is substantially
the exclusive inherited determinant of variety of product among school
children. (It is to be understood that intelligence may be, and probably
is, the summation of thousands of inherited factors,—neutral elements,
here merged in the broader behavioristic concept of intelligence.)
SCIENTIFIC QUESTIONS INVOLVED IN CLASSIFICATION
If we were able to negate other influences upon disparity of product,
we could conclude that these were not inherited. Hence it would be our
burden as educators so to manipulate education as to prevent their
operation. We will attempt to analyze the determinants of individual
differences in product in these children, to see which influences besides
intelligence are part of the inborn equipment which is not the province
of education, but of eugenics, to correct. No absolute validity is held
for any of the conclusions stated here. The subject is, at best, vague
and complicated; but our conclusions can be used as the basis for a
good guess in school procedure. We can judge general tendencies from the
educational experiences of the two hundred children whose abilities for
two years are here charted.
The importance to educators of the subject in hand is excuse enough
for its treatment. All educational procedure points a prophetic finger
toward the classification of pupils and a reduction of the individual
differences of product to the inherited bases of these differences.
Classification, however, needs some more accurate psychological
foundation than the mere awareness of individual variance. We must know:
1. What tests to use.
2. How to use them.
3. Whether abilities in reading, spelling, and arithmetic or their
predispositions exist as special abilities, or whether children differ in
these simply because of their innate differences of intelligence.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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