The Use of Tests in the Selection of Pupils for Rapid Advancement
- Author:
Beatrice Candee
Vocational Service for Juniors, New York City
A large group of problems in the vocational counselling in the New York City schools centers around the rapid advancement classes. The New York school system provides that any child whose school record warrants it, at the time that he enters junior high school, may be recommended by the principal of the elementary school which he is leaving for rapid work. This means that he will do 7 A and 7B in one term and 8A and 8B in the next, thus gaining a full year’s time. The principal of the junior high school must place any child so recommended in the rapid class and cannot remove him unless he fails. Fifteen per cent of the children in the system are supposed to carry this double program. This percentage has been determined by research.
It is entirely possible that fifteen per cent of the total school population of New York is capable of rapid work. The difficulty is that this cannot be interpreted to mean fifteen percent of every school. As might be expected in any large city, the distribution of ability varies widely from one school to another according to the section of the city. It is true that this fifteen per cent rule is not rigidly enforced. There seems to be no particular objection to a school having more than its alloted quota of rapid classes. The difficulty comes where the range of ability is low. Here large numbers of children attempt rapid work who logically should not do so. Many of them fail and others go on at the cost of greater effort than should be required of any child and are handicapped in their later work by the lack of thoroness in these two grades. There are various reasons why this happens. Teachers and principals tend to judge a child in relation to the group with which they are dealing, altho the curriculum for the rapid classes is constant throughout the city. The children themselves are always so eager to make rapid advance that they cooperate willingly with such a scheme, and only the teachers of the rapid classes and the vocational counselors, who have to worry about their work, see any objection to it. Chart I shows the distribution of I.Q.’s for four different junior high schools in the city. Schools A and B were given the same group 1 An address given at the meeting of the National Vocational Guidance Association, Feb. 21, 1930, Atlantic City, N.J.
test, the Haggerty Delta 2, by the same person. C had the same test, administered by a different person, and D had the Otis Advanced, Form A. A ranges from 60 to 170 I.Q. with a median at 113; B from 50 to 150 with a median at 100; C from 50 to 150 with a median at 96; D from 50 to 160 with a median at 96. The highest fifteen Percent of A would include only I.Q.’s over 138, in B everything over 115, in C over 114, and in D over 119.
The difficulties with rapid classes, and they are manifold, seem to spring largely from two sources?too large a percentage of “rapids” in schools where the range of ability is low, and the combination of the lack of an adequate testing program with a rule forbidding the organization of rapid classes on the basis of tests rather than ?f teacher’s judgments.
There is a rule which states that every child shall have an intelligence test before he enters the junior high school, but no provision for the testing is made. It states that there must be an I.Q. ?n the record card of each child in the junior high school, and the Methods of furnishing these I.Q.’s are many and various. Only 8- slight investigation is necessary to dampen one’s enthusiasm for urging any extensive use of these test results. Distribution oflQs Springlq
Chart II shows a plot of actual distributions of I.Q.’s in rapid classes in three schools in the spring of 1929. In practice, the rapid classes at A include 46 per cent of the school population, at B 17 per cent, at C 25 per cent. Even so, there is a wide difference in range of ability for children carrying the same curriculum. A ranges from 90 to 170 with a median at 125, B from 80 to 150 with a median at 118, C from 80 to 150 with a median at 109.
The efforts of the counselor at A to limit the rapid group to I.Q.’s over 120 is really not too high a standard if these classes are to fulfill the purpose for which they were originally planned, to furnish for bright children a program requiring the same amount of effort as that demanded of normal children in a normal progress curriculum. In any event, one might concede that a child should at least have superior intelligence to do double work without undue strain. In these classes, the actual percentages of children with I.Q.’s below 110 are; in A 14 per cent in B 27 per cent, in C 51 per cent. With the 14 per cent no one would quarrel as the imperfection of the tests themselves and compensating personality traits must allow some fluctuation about any critical score, but 27 and 51 seem unduly large percentages of normal children attempting a program intended for unusually bright ones.
Many of the problems concerning rapid classes would be solved if any pretense of a constant percentage in all schools were abandoned and each child required to meet certain objective standards, no matter how many, or particularly how few rapid classes this might mean in each school; if the intelligence test were given more weight than any other single criterion in the selection of these pupils; and if the recommendation of the elementary school principal might be modified by the principal and vocational counselor of the junior high school.
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.