Intelligence and Efficiency Tests Distinguished
- Author:
Ide, Ph. D.
University of Pennsylvania. The man who has had no experience or acquaintance with psychological tests is very apt to form the judgment that all tests of this variety have emanated from a hospital for the insane. A closer view of the form and subject matter of the tests may lead to a modification of his judgment. He will still maintain that most of the tests have been prepared by the inmates of the hospital, but he will admit that perhaps some of them have been produced by the keepers and attendants. The basis for the differentiation into the two groups is the apparent fact that while some of the tests show intelligence to some degree, the rest of them show that intelligence sadly gone astray. If we should examine the two classes of tests after the man on the street had divided them into the two groups, we should find that he had unconsciously divided them roughly into tests of efficiency, and tests of intelligence.
For it is the purpose of testing in general to answer either or both of two questions: What are the fundamental capacities of the individual in question, and how much has the individual acquired as a result of his contact with his environment? It is the group of tests prepared for the purpose of answering the second question that seem to be moderately sane. Their reasonableness arises in part from the fact that we are generally familiar with tests of that kind. If we change the name and call them examinations, we shall find ourselves on very familiar ground. From the beginning of school life on up to the end of it, we find the student exposed to a particular controlled environment, which is his instruction in class and the prescribed studying which he presumably does. At the end of the course a test, or examination, is given to see how much has been acquired during the progress of the course. Such an examination would be classified among the efficiency tests. It is not given to determine what the capacity or innate ability of the student may be, but merely to find out how much has been acquired. Two students of very different real ability may have acquired approximately the same amount from the course, the weaker one having put in a proportionately greater amount of time and labor. This acquirement may be in the form of a body of remembered knowledge, or a degree of manual or mental dexterity, but it is always something acquired.
While examinations fall in the class of efficiency tests it must not be too readily admitted that they are at all scientific as tests of that kind. The best that any examination can do is to put through a sampling process of greater or less exhaustiveness. If it were possible to give a student as an examination a test which would require the reproduction of the entire course, then the results of the examination would be an exact measure, at the time, of the amount acquired by the learner. But the examination at the very best can merely call for material taken at random from various parts of the course. It depends very largely upon the ability and industry of the examiner whether the samples taken are representative of the course, and whether the weight given each sample as its share of the entire score is commensurate with the difficulty of the question itself. But while examinations are often very faulty in these respects, it is so seldom that the fate of the subject rests entirely upon the examination that in the long run very little harm is done.
It is because of this lack of scientific accuracy and standardization in examinations that efficiency tests have sprung up to fill the need. This can best be made clear by referring to one of the best known and most popular of efficiency tests, the Courtis tests, particularly those in the fundamentals of arithmetic. The Courtis tests were evolved with the purpose of making it possible to compare the elementary work of various schools by means of some just and fixed standard. In the field of arithmetic it was simply done. In series A of the set of tests Mr. Courtis prepared a page of additions in which single figures were added to single figures. The score was the number of such additions which could be accomplished in one minute of time. The same form was followed in multiplication. In subtraction there was a slight modification, as the minuend sometimes contained two figures instead of one. In division the dividend was usually two figures, the divisor one, and the divisions always came out without a remainder. There was a fifth page on which the subject was given the task of copying single figures, to determine the speed of putting down figures when the operation did not involve any mathematical calculation.
The whole arrangement seems very simple and at first glance one does not see how it is any advance over what second and third grade teachers have been doing for many years. The main value of the test lies in the fact that it has been nationally standardized. It has been given to students in schools in nearly every state in the Union, and the results from many thousands of school children of all grades and ages have been combined to secure normal scores. With these normal scores available it is possible, and convenient, for any administrator to give the tests in his school and at once be able to compare his results with the standard results from the nation as a whole. In one respect the Courtis tests have become somewhat unfair as a means of comparison of work. The standard scores are being constantly brought up to date by the addition of the more recent results where the tests have been used. To induce administrators to submit the results from their schools Mr. Courtis makes a substantial discount in the price of the material to those who do send in the scores obtained. Where these tests are used, and further use anticipated, teachers and principals become ambitious for better results, and an excess of effort is expended in teaching especially that department of arithmetic. In fact, Mr. Courtis publishes a set of practice cards to further this very thing. As a result many of the scores which are incorporated with these of previous years to obtain revised standards are from schools which have made a specialty of this thing. The standard scores therefore steadily become higher. The superintendent of a school which has not been vigorously drilling is usually greatly disappointed when he first gives the test in his school. Mr. Courtis has since published series B in the fundamentals of arithmetic, in which all the processes are longer and more complicated. Whether they represent an improvement over the first series produced is still a matter of opinion.
It can readily be seen that the Courtis tests in the fundamentals of arithmetic are purely a test of acquirement, an efficiency test. This is shown by evidence of various kinds. Two students of widely different degrees of innate ability may get the same scores in the addition test, merely because one has had more or better training than the other. Also, any student may progress from one score in the test to a much higher score in a later attempt by putting in the requisite amount of study and practice.
This is not the case with the other general class of tests, the intelligence test. In this form of investigation, the attempt is made to determine the innate abilities of the subject, regardless of the formal teaching he may have had, or the good or poor fortune of his environment. It is the attempt to eliminate the effect of training and experience which makes these tests appear as if they had been produced in the wandering minds of the inmates of a hospital for the insane. It seems reasonable to be tested to see what we can do by special endeavor and practice, but to be tested for what we can do in a game in which we cannot improve our work by practice, falls outside the reasonable experience of the individual.
An illustration of this style of test is the one which rightly or wrongly goes by the name of the memory span test. In this test, a series of digits is read slowly to the subject, and he is required to reproduce the digits in the same order at the close of the presentation. The score is the largest number of digits he can successfully reproduce at one time. It may or may not be a measure of one’s memory. But the important thing to be noticed about the test is that no amount of training is able to bring about any significant increase in the score which the individual can obtain. It may vary with fatigue, with illness, with age, but seems to have nothing to do with training. Another test of this same variety is found in the various forms of the cancellation test. A common one is the Columbia A test. In this there is a page of capital letters, printed in random order, and one out of every five, but not every fifth one, is a capital A. The score is the number of capital A’s which the subject can cancel in a minute of time. Here again, no amount of training with a set of the tests seems to bring about any improvement in the work of the subject. The various directions tests are all contrived with the same end in view. The subject is given certain standardized directions, in following which he is to accomplish tasks for which he has made no immediate preparation. If the tests have been well contrived, any two people of the same degree and type of intelligence would be able to obtain approximately the same score, regardless of the formal education which they had received, or of the good or poor opportunities represented by their several environments. This then is the basic difference between the two classes of tests, whether they are calculated to test ability independently of training received, or whether they are testing the degree of the accomplishment resulting from training. There are other aspects in which the two forms of tests usually differ.
Since the efficiency test is not attempting to analyze the individual’s condition, but his progress, it is almost never an attempt to get a measurement of any single mental factor or faculty. There is no aim to differentiate between visual memory and auditory memory, but merely to find out how much has been remembered. The examiner is not attempting to find out whether the imagination is largely motor or largely tactile, but rather to see what the subject has accomplished, or can accomplish by means of the imagination. Any number of different mental powers may be put in use in accomplishing a specific addition or subtraction of numbers. In the efficiency test we measure the accomplishment that results from the total combination of the powers, not differentiating one from the other. The efficiency test is not at all at fault for failing to make this distinction in its results, because this distinction is of no advantage to the purpose of the test. On the other hand the tests are much simpler than the intelligence tests, for the very’reason that they are not required to distinguish one mental power from another. But the measurement of particular and distinct mental powers is the chief and sole aim of the intelligence test. Very little has been accomplished in the diagnosis of the mentality of the individual if as the result of a test or a series of tests we can get only a score which represents the measurement of a complex of powers. It is necessary to analyze and measure by every means which ingenuity can invent in order to find and evaluate the various contributions to the total intelligence which the various mental powers present. It is again this attempt to get down to the fundamental, the unitary, which gives to intelligence tests the strangeness of appearance that arouses amusement in the minds of the inexperienced.
This situation throws some light upon the question which is arousing so much interest today, that of employing psychological tests as a means of determining the fitness of a candidate for entrance into the University. Examinations for admission hitherto, have been pretty largely tests of accomplishment. They strove to answer the question?has the candidate learned enough so that he may go on with the content which the University courses offer him? The new attitude might lead to the imposing of intelligence tests to determine whether the candidate is of that capacity of mind which warrants him to undertake the work of the University. Since tests calculated to lead to the answer to the second question are necessarily of unusual character, strange to the mind of many, it is unlikely that the proposition of using them will grow rapidly in popular favor. In the previous pages the assumption seems to have been made that the two forms of tests are distinct. In practical operation this is not the case. Each depends upon the other. In the efficiency test, the test of accomplishment, the test of intelligence is invariably involved. For an instance of this we may use again the Courtis fundamentals test. When I learn how rapidly an individual has learned to add figures, I have a measure of a complex of mental attainments, which includes many factors which are not attainments at all. There is the varying reaction time, the varying memory span, the varying attention span, the fundamental difference in speed of movement as distinguished from the speed of initiating movement, and many other factors. Variation in these factors will of course modify the final score of the individual, but as I have suggested above, the efficiency test is not concerned with the factors which have brought about the results, but with the complex of the results themselves.
The intelligence test, in its turn, almost always requires a certain amount of acquirement. In the Columbia cancellation test, the subject must learn, or have learned, the differences between the letters, in order to take the test at all. In the memory span experiment, the person tested must know the various digits. But if the amount of acquirement assumed is easily within the experience of the one tested, it causes no variation in the result. If a test were so selected that the individual should grade low because there were factors in it which he had not yet learned, it would be open to considerable criticism. This would be the case if I should attempt to measure the memory span of the ordinary twelve year old boy and give him the digits in Greek.
To sum up, we find that tests divide at once into two classes, those of capacity, and those of accomplishment. The latter are familiar and reasonable, the former unfamiliar and at first unreasonable. The intelligence test attempts to measure mental unitary powers, the efficiency test to measure the results of combined powers. The intelligence test tries to make itself independent of the acquirement test, and succeeds only in part, while the acquirement test always includes the intelligence as a part of the complex which it measures.
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