Report of the Consultative Committee on psychological tests of educable capacity and their possible use in the public system of education.

  • Great Britain. Board of Education. Consultative Committee.
Date:
1924
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Report of the Consultative Committee on psychological tests of educable capacity and their possible use in the public system of education. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    students of Columbia University!. Both of them aimed, by the intensive application of a long programme of laboratory tests to separate individuals, at making “‘a systematic inventory of their mental traits.” Although rich in suggestions for later inquiries, Galton with his English collaborators, achieved along these lines no final conclusions of his own. And, during the closing years of the nineteenth century the notion of mental testing, in spite of its English origin, was taken over almost exclu- sively by foreign investigators—by such early workers as Oehrn and Ebbinghaus, in Germany, and Boas and Gilbert in America, and, later on, Bourdon, Binet, Henri, and their collaborators in France. These earliest foreign researches, carried out between 1890 and 1900, though numerous, proved contradictory and disappointing. Yet, even at the present time, they are by no means uninstructive. They exhibit, in a clear and concrete fashion, the main recurrent fallacies that beset all who attempt to apply psychological tests to practical ends. Of these initial investigations nearly every one is character- ised by two limitations: first, the experimenters confined themselves almost entirely to the simplest mental processes : secondly, they possessed no adequate statistical procedure for determining the value of their results. IV.—IHE; USE..OF SIMPLE SENSORY. TiSsTS. 6. The tests first used for the measurement of mental capacity consisted chiefly of the traditional laboratory experi- ments upon simple sensory discrimination. For this there seems to have been several reasons. To begin with, the majority of the new experiments in pure psychology, experiments chiefly suggested by the methods of physiology and physics, were at that time concerned with sensory capacities—with the ear, the eye and the skin, the perception of sound, of light, of weight, and so forth. Further, theoretical psychologists both in England and abroad were still much under the influence of that British school of Philosophy, whose axiom had been—“ Nihil in intellectu quod non prius in sensu.” The working hypothesis underlying all these early studies with sensory tests seems to 1 J. McK. Cattell and L. Farrand Psych. Rev. (1896), 618-648 ‘““ Physical and Mental Measurements of the Students of Columbia University.”