Volume 1

Manual of mental and physical tests : a book of directions compiled with special reference to the experimental study of school children in the laboratory or classroom / by Guy Montrose Whipple.

  • Whipple, Guy Montrose, 1876-1941.
Date:
1914-1915
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Manual of mental and physical tests : a book of directions compiled with special reference to the experimental study of school children in the laboratory or classroom / by Guy Montrose Whipple. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    *> NATURE AND PURPOSE OF MENTAL TESTS mental functions by the test-method may supply us with a satis¬ factory account of the nature and interrelations of mental functions, just as the typical introspective experiment has been able to furnish an account of the structural make-up of mind. If we could, to take an instance, obtain an exact science of mental functions so that we could know the unit-characters of mind as the biologist knows, or expects to know, the unit-char¬ acters of plants and animals, the study of mental inheritance would be carried appreciably forward. Outside the laboratory an active and very natural interest in mental tests has been exhibited by those who are busy with practical problems to the solution of which the scientific study of mind may be expected to contribute. It is, naturally, the educator to whom the development of a significant and reliable system of mental tests would most appeal, since he is concerned with the development of just those capacities of mind that these tests propose to measure. It was a practical educational problem, for instance, that motivated the work of Binet and Simon, whose system of serial graded tests is just now to the forefront of popular interest. Of late, too, hopeful beginnings have been made in the applica¬ tion of mental tests to vocational guidance, whether in the selec¬ tion of people for positions or the selection of positions for people. But the magnitude and complexity of these tasks, par¬ ticularly of the second, is far greater than commonly supposed. And this leads us to point out that there has been, unfortu¬ nately it seems to us, a disposition in some quarters to speak as if a science of mental tests were already achieved; as if, for instance, a child’s native ability could now be measured as easily as liis height, or as if his suggestibility or his capacity for concentration of attention could be determined as readilv as e' his skull circumference or his breathing capacity. To make such assertions is surely misleading, for, as the study of the tests herein embodied will show, there is, at the present time, scarcely a single mental test that can be applied unequivocally as a psychical measuring-rod. The fact is we have not agreed upon methods of procedure; we too often do not know what we