Report of the Consultative Committee on psychological tests of educable capacity and their possible use in the public system of education.

  • Great Britain. Board of Education. Consultative Committee.
Date:
1924
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Report of the Consultative Committee on psychological tests of educable capacity and their possible use in the public system of education. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    whether normal or abnormal, who do not possess at least one or two so-called stigmata of degeneracy.: Unless several of such stigmata are found together in one and the same individual, the indications mean little or nothing; and the conjunction of a number of them is rarely seen, even in special schools for educable defectives, or, in fact, anywhere beyond the walls of asylums for low-grade imbeciles, whither the so-called clinical types are now commonly removed. Except for these rare pathological cases, psychologists are nowadays agreed in distrusting all snapshot judgments based upon an inspection of the face and head ; and, when diagnosing mental characteristics, rely upon mental rather than upon physical critervat. IlI—THE ORIGIN OF MENTAL TESTING. 4. Of the application of the new experimental methods to the direct study of the differences of individual minds, the most conspicuous result was the invention of mental tests. After many long and doubtful trials the possibility of mental testing has at length received general acceptance ; and recently upon an enormous scale, its value has been demonstrated, and its uses popularised, by the wholesale psychological examination of recruits for the American Army. 5. Early Experimental Work. It is a widespread but erroneous notion, current both among teachers and the general public, that psychological testing is a foreign invention, a new and alien import brought to England from abroad ; 1 In each of these views—in the speculations of the physiog- nomist, in the fancies of the phrenologist, and in the doctrine of anatomical stigmata—there are, of course, certain elements of truth. Glandular disturbances, for example, affect both character and intelligence, on the one hand, and the development of the bony structures—most conspicuously, perhaps, the bony structures of the head—upon the other. Racial types, again, are character- ised by slight differences in intellect and emotionality, and tend to exhibit distinctive traits in the conformation of the skull and face. Quite recently, the method of correlation has shown that often the inferences of practised observers from peculiarities of facial expression are trustworthy to a tolerably high degree, though here, indeed, it is not so much the shape of the hard features or of the bony framework that is significant, but rather the tonus and contractions of the facial muscles, the habitual expression of moods, and the passing responses to emotional stimuli (See references cited in footnote ? p. 2 above).