The Psychological Methods of Testing Intelligence
REVIEWS AND CRITICISM. :Author: William Stern. Tr. by Guy Montrose Whipple. Baltimore: Warwick and York, 1914. Pp. x + 160. (Edu. Psych. Monographs No. 13.)
The work of which this is the English translation, was completed in German in October, 1912. Therefore it necessarily fails to cover the very extensive discussion of tests, which has been carried on the past two and a half years. Professor Whipple remarks that this “book affords what is, so far as I know, the best, and in fact almost the only authoritative, critical, and compact general survey of the literature of intelligence testing, which is adapted for lay readers as well as for professional psychologists.” It will be observed that Dr Stern’s critical faculty expends much of its force upon the literature of testing, and does not go far enough in questioning the validity of the concept of ‘intelligence’ as used by the testers. After saying, “We not only limit intelligence by setting it over against the emotive and volitional nature of an individual, but also ascribe to it a definitely restricted place within the mental functions,” he proceeds to formulate his own definition as follows: “Intelligence is a general capacity of an individual consciously to adjust his thinking to new problems and conditions of life,” and adds, “If talent be a material efficiency, intelligence is a formal efficiency.’’ Dr Stern trusts “that distinctions may serve to lessen the confusion that has been current,” but confusion certainly reigns in his definition until we recall the Platonic distinction between matter and form, and understand the peculiar sense in which he is using ‘material’ and ‘formal.’ This may be partly due to the translator. Dr Stern is none too clear, again, when he says, “The fact that intelligence can be more easily treated quantitatively than can other individual capacities, must not lead us to overestimate its import. Nevertheless the fact that we can deal with intelligence by itself, does serve to disclose the structure of the personality. We can determine whether a performance of greater or lesser degree depends on talent or on intelligence; we can investigate what degree of correspondence exists between the experimental results and the teachers’ judgments of the intelligence of pupils.” Three main lines of activity furnish Dr Stern with the principle of division of his treatment: (1) single tests; (2) the Binet-Simon scale; (3) the correlation methods of Pearson, Spearman, and others. With regard to the slow growth of method he comments, “It will be long, very long, before we realize the optimistic hope that Spearman attaches to the correlation method of testing intelligence, when he says, ‘Indeed, it seems possible to foresee the day when there will be an annual official determination of the intellectual index of every child in the [British] empire.’” Dr Stern emphasizes the fact “that tests of intelligence are not easy to conduct. Their administration demands extended practice, psychological training, and a critical mind,” and he cites as an example of the commonly prevailing mistaken ideas upon this matter, Captain Meyer’s [of the German army] declaration that “in military enlistment tests of intelligence could some day be carried on quite mechanically by subalterns.”
In the beginning, “For a long time,” says Dr Stern, “we started from the erroneous presupposition that any psychological method of experimentation would be really usable as a test,” and he considers, “A significant advance was made when it was recognized that tests of intelligence must be definitely selected on the basis of certain presuppositions that were to be made concerning the nature of intelligence.”
“Various psychologists,” Dr Stern remarks, have considered various “mental functions to be the touchstone of intelligence.” He mentions the “combination” or “completion” method of Ebbinghaus; Ries’ word-association test; “the combination test of Masselon in which a meaningful sentence is to be made from three given words,” and Meumann’s elaboration of this test to require a logical or moral connection between the words combined; Heilbronner’s picturetest; and Bernstein and Rossolimo’s use of cut-up pictures which are to be fitted together. “In an earlier stage of his work,” says Dr Stern, “Binet believed that the essence of intelligence was capacity to adjust attention. … In the work of Meumann we note at times the laying of a certain one-sided emphasis on the understanding of the abstract as being the root of intelligence… . Quite a number of investigators have directed their attention particularly to capacity to apprehend, as the index of intelligence.”
A third main class of tests includes “those patterned after familiar pedagogical tasks,” and here we are surprised to find no mention of Mr. Courtis’ work, the first reports of which appeared as early as September and November of 1911. Not being aware of the Courtis tests, Dr Stern is to be pardoned for his comment, “The intelligence of individuals that are working or that have worked, under different school conditions cannot be subjected to comparative tests by means of these activities.”
In his fourth main class Dr Stern places those tests which “aim to secure records of such evidences of intelligence as are accepted in ordinary life as special evidence of it. These direct tests of intelligence have been specially developed by the psychiatrists; they comprise such things as defining, comparing, differentiating, the understanding of proverbs, grasping the point of a joke, seeing absurdities in verbal or pictorial presentations.” “No single lest, no matter how good it may be,” says Dr Stern, “should ever be made the instrument for testing the intelligence of an individual.” He seems to have no appreciation of the formboard as a testing device?indeed, he fails even to mention such a thing. Had he studied the operation of the formboard test with normal and subnormal children, it is almost certain that he would have wished to retract this sweeping opinion.
From a study of separate tests, “three things are evident: first, series of tests must be arranged that will set in play the various constituent functions of intelligence; secondly, for this purpose there must be a wise selection of tests, … thirdly, there must be created a system by means of which the several particular results of the testing can be united into one resultant value, i. e. a value that shows the grade of intelligence of the subject objectively in an inclusive formula in which performances of different degrees of value shall in some way be compensated.” “Numerous test series,” Dr Stern explains, “have been used by the psychiatrists for testing intelligence,” and among them he mentions the classifications of Sommer and of Ziehen. A highly interesting method of testing and recording mental ability is that of the Russian alienist, G. Rossolimo, and we could wish that Dr Stern had given us more information about it. “Rossolimo,” he says, “has contrived ten tests for each of ten different mental functions. The results obtained from the single subject are set out graphically by erecting ordinates corresponding to the number of the tests achieved for each of the functions under test. The ends of these ordinates are then joined to make a curve that Rossolimo calls the ‘individual profile’.” Part II, which comprises the middle two-thirds of the book, is concerned with the method of age-gradation (Binet-Simon method). The discussion here will be largely an old story to Americans who have followed the work of Goddard, Wallin, Johnstone, Terman and Childs, Pintner, Town, and others in this country. Dr Stern deals all too briefly with a phenomenon which has drawn the attention of many clinical psychologists who have applied the Binet tests, i. e. the range of irregularity (Streuungsbreite). “A child whose successes and failures are strewn irregularly over test-levels from six to ten years has the same mental age, to be sure, but a very different range of irregularity, when compared with another whose mixture of successes and failures lies in the seventh to the ninth years only. Bobertag, who first gave attention to the importance of differences in ranges of irregularity, has devised a way of computing this factor; I have myself suggested another way, but neither has been published as yet.” Further on he says “The area of irregular distribution is very much wider with the feebleminded than with the normal child.”
Part III deals with estimation and testing of finer gradations of intelligence. Dr Stern decides that neither the Binet test nor the ordinary school ranking is adequate to show the degree of intelligence of the pupil. He asks, “Is it possible, on the basis of a short examination with a series of tests to arrive at a gradation of pupils that corresponds with their actual differences of intelligence and such that the rank that each gains is sufficiently characteristic of his grade of intelligence within the group?” He finds of dubious value Spearman’s method of testing and correlating, because “The mere comparison of tests with one another affords us neither a clear insight into the necessary compensations, nor a decision as to the symptomatic value of the testing; rather must we seek the means of gauging the tests in some criterion that lies outside of experiment. Such a criterion is supplied by the estimation of the pupils made by the teacher.” He approves Binet’s suggestion that this task of estimating intelligence be assigned to “teachers specially trained and specially gifted in psychology,” and he adds with emphasis, “Only those pupils should be located in a given rank-order of intelligence that are sufficiently like one another in other respects.”
In this connection Dr Stern contributes some original investigations of his own, in which he had three different teachers estimate the intelligence of an Untertertia grade in a Gymnasium (equivalent approximately to our first high school year). He comments upon the result, “This decided correspondence of the judgments of the teachers on their pupils’ intelligence, taken in conjunction with the fair degree of independence of their judgment from the class-place, seems to me to be a forcible argument for the scientific usefulness of the method of intelligence estimation.” In conclusion he sums up the points to be observed in working at the problem of ranking by tests, as (a) measurability; (b) reliability; (c) fairly high correlation; (d) comprehensiveness; (e) estimation of intelligence; (/) construction of an amalgamated rank-order.
The book has a complete bibliography of material published from the summer of 1911 until September, 1912, which is intended to supplement the bibliography contained in Dr Stern’s earlier work, Die differentielle Psychologie. Professor Whipple has done a real service in making this discussion of intelligence testing available for English readers. A T.
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