Testing the Development of Young Children
- Author:
Susan Isaacs, M.A., D.Sc.
Charlotte Buehler’s recent volume on this subject* is of great interest for all students of young children, whether for the purpose of understanding their development or of serving it practically. The book embodies, in so condensed a form that it might easily fail to be appreciated, a considerable mass of concrete knowledge of the typical behaviour and individual variations of children between birth and six years of age, the product of a large amount of careful observation and experiment.
The outstanding characteristic of the authors’ work is the emphasis upon the study of the child in natural situations. The tests are not the artificial products of the laboratory, but of the child’s spontaneous play in the natural conditions of his ordinary life. At every point one has the sense that it is the child who is being examined and described and discussed, not an abstract concept of his development. This study of the child under his natural conditions and with the natural materials of his play is a deliberate technique, fully supported by practical experience and by theoretical considerations. Students of child psychology owe a great debt to Charlotte Buehler for her constant emphasis upon the need to study the child as a whole, and the performances of the child, viz., the activities which embody real motives and bring real satisfactions. No more effective antidote to a crude behaviourism could be found than this book.
Connected with this quality is the insistence upon the need to test all aspects of the child’s development, to see his intellectual achievements in their normal setting of interests and social relations. In this respect, of course, the authors’ work is one with that of Gesell, Stutsman and Goodenough. It was indeed a very striking fact that when mental testers came face to face with the infant and quite young child, they were immediately made to realise by the child himself how impossible it is to isolate purely intellectual activity and to study it apart from manipulative play, sense perception and social relations. It may be possible to do this to a greater or lesser extent (less rather than greater) with the child of six or seven years and over; but quite impossible with the infant and young child.
The ripe wisdom of the chapter on the technique of testing is outstanding. The practical instructions in the art of testing are based on a real appreciation of the child’s interests and of the way in which his mind operates in relation to people and things.
Unfortunately, however, it must be pointed out that three serious weaknesses characterise the book. The first is the inadequacy and inaccuracy of the historical introduction. The account offered of the history of the development of intelligence tests does much less than justice to many of the outstanding figures and shows much confusion of thought. It is said, for instance, that ” Binet complicated the problem further by attempting to ascertain the normal *Testing Children’s Development from Birth to School Age. By Charlotte Buehler, and Hildegard Hetzer. Translated from the German by Henry Beaumont. George Allen & Unwin, 1935. 12s. 6d. Pp. 191.
development of intelligence without testing learning ability ” (p. 20). But lower down on the same page it is remarked that ” The improvement which German scientists, especially Stern, Lipmann and Bobertag, made in the Binet-Simon tests, were of this type in that they tried to develop tests which called for real intelligence, not the outcome of good education and training.” (Reviewer’s italics in both cases.) It is hardly true that Binet did not test learning ability. It was, rather, an essential part of his aim, and to some extent his real achievement, to arrive at a scale of tests which would reveal precisely the normal learning ability of the normal child in the ordinary environment, by using in the tests such minimal knowledge and experience as are to be found in the average child in an ordinary environment. If the child in an ordinary environment has not by a given age attained such knowledge, then that is assumed to be because his level of learning ability is below the average. The large verbal element in the tests, however, did in fact render them applicable only to children who had had ordinary schooling and not, e.g., to gipsy or canal boat children. Hence the later development of performance tests, not involving linguistic ability and applicable to all.
Again, it is not adequate to the work of Gesell and others to say that ” These systems … are arranged without a unifying principle of selection ” (p. 25). Gesell certainly avoided making any rigid classification of the child’s behaviour before studying it. One of his aims was to arrive at a just and unifying principle of selection. To discover the principle of selection is surely part of the work, and tests are themselves one instrument for discovering this principle, as was shown, for example, by the critical work of Burt upon Binet’s tests and indeed of Binet himself upon his first Scale.
The theoretical, as distinct from the empirical, basis of the tests offered in this volume is weak in many points. It is emphasised that ” one has to attempt to make sure what kind of ability and performance one wants to test before constructing a series of tests ” (p. 20); and then the particular viewpoint of the authors is stated:
“A knowledge of the fundamental categories of human behaviour was lacking. On the basis of experimental evidence and general observations, we distinguish six such categories which should be reached by the tests. In the first place there are the two facts of sense stimulation and spontaneous movements. We call these (1) sense reception and (2) bodily movements. We group under the latter also all those very characteristic movements which serve to increase bodily control. The contact with other human beings is to be regarded as specific and fundamental. This is category (3)?social behaviour. Two further fundamental facts are the ability of behaviour to change on the basis of experience and the activity of the individual by which he changes his environment. These facts are: (4) learning, and (5) manipulation of materials. Finally, the basic fact of the creation of and striving towards goals is to be called (6) mental productivity ” (pp. 26-7).
The view that these six categories are ” fundamental categories ” of human behaviour is of course a purely descriptive statement, and is, we would suggest, description of a distinctly superficial kind, useful for many practical working purposes, but not to be taken as even approaching a final analysis. We would criticise this conception from two points of view. First of all, it entirely ignores all recent developments in the statistical analysis of psychological data; and above all, the technique of factor-analysis is a means of discovering the ” fundamental categories.” In general, the authors do not appear to be in touch with modern statistical techniques, or to appreciate (returning to the first criticism made above) the value of statistical studies of the results of tests in revealing those unifying principles from which it is here assumed one must set out. The unifying principle is surely the end product rather than the starting point of the work.
Secondly, even without statistical procedure, a qualitative analysis based upon observational studies in development will show at once that these six categories overlap to a very considerable extent. Sense reception, e.g., is not a static but a dynamic process, one which itself involves ” learning ability.” In learning to recognise things or people, the child is evincing learning ability. Moreover, the manipulation of materials, e.g., his own fingers and toes, and his early play with objects, undoubtedly enter as integral elements into the growth of his perceptions. The child is solving problems in every advance of his perception even of the colours, shapes, sizes and movements of objects. A perception of a thing at, say, six months or a year is the end product of a highly complicated integrative process of response to sensory stimuli, the bringing together of elements from various sense organs, and the inherent modification of immediate stimulation by many past experiences. And how much sense reception and bodily movements enter into social behaviour! As an example, take the fact which Shirley1 has described, that at about six months of life one of the chief delights of the baby is to manipulate his mother’s face, trying to push his finger into her eyes and mouth, grasping at her hair, etc. Here are bodily and manipulative movements, a gradually refining visual perception of his mother’s face, and social behaviour, all occurring intimately together.
It is one of the most interesting facts of genetic psychology to-day how closely the qualitative analysis of the behaviour of young children and the conclusions of -Spearman and his co-workers support and confirm each other with regard to the essential noegenetic elements in the development of intelligent behaviour and thinking in the child. As Professor Spearman2 has put it, ” Not a cognitive operation can be performed, from the loftiest flight of genius down to the prattle in the nursery, but that it resolves itself wholly into these same [noegenetic] principles with their ensuing processes. And all this is no less true of the so-called ‘ practical ‘ doings. …” The truth of these remarks is borne out by the fact that in the profile charts offered in this book and based upon this classification, sense reception does not appear after the eighteenth month, whereas manipulation does not begin until three months, and mental productivity until ten months. It would thus be a much more adequate statement of the facts to say that the learning JShirley : The First Two Years.
2C. Spearman. : The Nature of Intelligence and the Principles of Cognition, p. 353, and mental productivity of the infant is evinced first of all through the medium of sense reception and bodily control, and then after a time begins to assume also the form of definitively social reactions, the manipulation of materials and verbal thinking. This would express, far more effectively than these six so-called fundamental categories, that unity in diversity of the child’s growth, which in other regards the authors so rightly emphasise.
I would suggest that in this crude classification, Charlott Buehler does much less than justice to her own so admirable observations upon the development of the infant in the first year of life. And in stressing so much that this is the ground-work of her tests and the special feature which distinguishes them from those of Gesell, the authors are emphasising one of the weakest points of their contribution.
As regards the actual tests, they are, in spite of all the rightful emphasis upon the need to study all aspects of the child’s behaviour, woefully inadequate on the social side. If one looks at the section of social behaviour in the orientation chart, it is seen that whilst the social tests for the early months may be adequate enough (the outstanding exception being one of the tests for the fourth month, in which the experimenter puts on a mask in order to estimate the child’s social responses) and remain reasonably satisfactory in the second year, no clinical student of the highly complex social responses of children in the third year onwards could subscribe to the notion that such fragmentary and superficial tests as the following could, as they stand, be diagnostic or even usefully indicative:?Third year: ” talking about absent things,” ” resuming an activity on demand,” ” social element in fiction play.” Fourth year: ” verbal formulation of plans,” ” sorting 200 slips of paper upon one command,” and ” moral judgment of represented actions.” Fifth year: ” performing three tasks,” ” competition ” and ” understanding the rules of a game.” Sixth year-. ” drawing a border,” and ” understanding the rules of a game and competition.” ” Talking about absent things ” is certainly a social activity, but it involves quite as much intellectual element, and possibly even more. All sorts of children with every type of clinical difficulty or normal mode of feeling, can ” talk about absent things ” at this age?all save those whose emotional difficulties have been so great as seriously to retard their general intellectual development. Again, the verbal formulation of plans or the moral judgment of represented actions are important enough studies in themselves, but trivial and irrelevant as a means of diagnosis of social development. The fifth and sixth years are ludicrously inadequate.
If these are adequate tests of social development, then the Binet-Simon scale itself is such, since the problems of comprehension, judging which is the prettier face, interpretation of pictures, and all the other tests involving verbal prevision, are of the same order as these tests suggested here. The ” social element in fiction play ” is indeed a significant matter, from which we could learn almost all we needed to know about the child’s inner life. But everything depends upon what we do with the material which the child offers in his play, whether we can understand what he is showing us. The mere fact
that the child will play or not, will certainly be very important; even more significant may be the details of the way in which he plays. But then it is no longer a matter of a test which is passed or failed, but of the clinical and qualitative appreciation of the precise individual forms which the child’s phantasies take.
As far as these tests go, the work of Charlotte Buehler and Hildegard Hetzer cannot bear comparison with that of Katharine Bridges or Florence Goodenough or Rachel Stutsman. The construction of an adequate schedule of social and emotional development still is one of the biggest problems awaiting research with young children, and it would appear lamentable if such a thin and superficial substitute for a genuine appreciation of the problem were to be accepted.
The consensus of expert opinion at the present day is that all attempts to construct really reliable tests of temperament, character or social behaviour have proved largely sterile. As Dr Vernon says: “Of the hundreds of tests which have been tried out, scarcely one can be recommended as achieving the same degree of reliability and validity as many educational tests.”3 Again: ” Temperament and character are too complex and fluid ever to be quantified by a few simple short cuts.”4 At the very least ” Responses to suitable miniature situations, facts of past history, affective expressions and introspections, and the impressions of others, should all be taken into account.”3 Dr Stutsman’s method for arriving at some judgment of the child’s temperament and social development, viz., by a fairly elaborate schedule of observations (on a five point scale) made during the whole of the responses to the test situation, and the child’s behaviour in relation to the tester, is obviously a good deal nearer to the requirements of an adequate diagnosis of temperament than these few mainly linguistic tests of Buehler and Hetzer.
It is fortunate that the clinical student and the diagnostic physician do not have to wait for precise and quantitative tests.
The Decroly Class
Mile. Amelie Hamai’de, Principal of the Ecole Nouvelle Amelie Hamai’de, Ixelles, Belgium, is to give four lectures in London, at the County Hall, Westminster Bridge Road, on Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Monday, 31st August, 2nd, 4th and 7th September.
The lectures will describe an experiment in the education of children from 6 to 12 years, initiated in Brussels by the late Dr Decroly and carried on by Mile. Hamai’de. The fee to teachers for the Course will be 4/-, and particulars can be obtained from the Education Officer, County Hall, S.E.i. 3P. E. Vernon : ” Tests of Temperament and Character,” Year Book of Education, 1935, p. 509. *lbid., p. 525. 5Ibid., p. 525.
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