Measurement of Efficiency of Schools for the Deaf
NEWS AND COMMENT.
The Conference of Superintendents and Principals of American Schools for the Deaf, meeting in Staunton, Virginia, in July, 1914, appointed a national committee to examine into and report concerning the efficiency of schools for the deaf and methods of measuring such efficiency, etc. Mr. Richard O. Johnson, superintendent Indiana State School for the Deaf, was selected as chairman of the committee, and the other members are: Augustus Rogers, M.A., superintendent of the Kentucky school; A. L. E. Crouter, M.A., LL.D., superintendent of the Pennsylvania school; John W. Jones, M.A., superintendent of the Ohio school; and Professor W. M. Kilpatrick, B.Ph., of the Connecticut school. In 1914 and 1915 three meetings of the committee were held?in Indianapolis, Columbus, Ohio, and Philadelphia. At the request of the committee and with its active co-operation, Dr Rudolph Pintner, associate professor of Psychology in the Ohio State University, and his collaborator, Mr. Donald G. Paterson, have made certain educational tests in the Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania schools, establishing norms for deaf children for comparison with those for hearing children. An age and grade scale, with age, grade and progress norms, and norms of physical measurements, etc., have been established, and consideration given to school and class measurement of pupils and teachers, preparatory schools and normal training for teachers, literary and industrial curricula, etc., in short, the entire field of education for the deaf has been and is being fully considered by the committee.
Among the tentative conclusions reached, after careful correlation, are those that indicate that the deaf child is three to four years behind the hearing child in learning ability, as tested by the rapidity and accuracy of forming associations between numbers and forms; that the deaf boy and the deaf girl are equal in learning ability, which is not the case with the hearing boy and hearing girl, the latter being the superior; that the deaf boy, however, approximates more closely the hearing boy than does the deaf girl the hearing girl; that there is practically no difference between the learning ability of the congenitally and the adventitiously deaf; and that the test results indicate a high correlation, or correspondence, between the three state schools taken separately and for each of the tests applied in each of the schools. Variations of course, occur in the curves plotted for the separate schools and between those for classification in each school, but generally they approximate each other closely. The curves for girls are more irregular and variable than those for the boys, but in no case are the variations uniform and constant excepting in two instances, i. e. in all three schools the girls at eleven years of age show a pronounced drop in attainment while the same occurs in lesser degree for boys at fourteen years of age.
Disclaimer
The historical material in this project falls into one of three categories for clearances and permissions:
Material currently under copyright, made available with a Creative Commons license chosen by the publisher.
Material that is in the public domain
Material identified by the Welcome Trust as an Orphan Work, made available with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
While we are in the process of adding metadata to the articles, please check the article at its original source for specific copyrights.