A STUDY OF THE RELATIVE INFLUENCES OF ABILITY AND 

 TRAINING ON PERFORMANCE. 



SAMUEL BENSHAW. 



There is a somewhat widespread notion that education or training tends 

 strongly to eliminate inherited variations and to bring all persons to a single 

 approximate level of achievement capacity. This paper reports a study of 

 the nature and extent of the influence of twelve year.s' training on the per- 

 formances of a group of sixty men students in a S. A. T. C. unit, whose chrono- 

 logical ages, training, health, social status, etc., were in clo.se approximation. 

 The group is thus a selected one, as selections go, and one should expect to 

 find little variation in abilities or performance. Especially is this true if 

 ability is demanded to attain high school graduation and admission to insti- 

 tutions of collegiate rank. 



Studies of the use of differentiating mental tests with college freshmen 

 are reported by Whipple, Yoakum, Bell, Waugh, Wissler, Sunue, Cattell and 

 Farrand, Simpson, Uhl, Calfee, Tolman, Rugg, McCall, Thorndike and others. 

 Many divergent varieties of tests were employed in these studies. Most of 

 them deal with correlations of test ranks or scores with semester marks, 

 achievement in certain collegiate subjects, etc. Since the experiences with 

 psychometry in the army, attention is being redirected to studies of this type 

 and efforts are being renewed and extended. Columbia University is reported 

 to be about to make certain selected groups of tests a weighty factor in her 

 requirements for matriculation. Yerkes, in a recently published paper, asks 

 for the early grouping of all pupils in the public elementary schools into three 

 types, represented by A, B and C abilities and the reshaping of the course of 

 study, distribution of time, etc., to meet these specific abilities or disabilities. 



From all this one may infer that there is a strong tendency away from 

 devices, refiuemens of technique and of content in human training and an 

 equally positive movement toward the other pole — inherited potentialities — 

 which things have been pointed out by the biologists as the real, essential and 

 almost immutable differentia. 



"In the present paper the term ability is made to include the sum-total of 

 determining tendencies which in the face of a fixed group of stimuli resolve 

 themselves into new, rapid and adequately adaptive (not in the Darwinian 

 sense) action-systems according to the laws of recency and frequency. 

 (Frequency being (considered as possessing by all odds the greater weight). The 

 subjects who have ability are distinguished from those designated by the term 



21st Mich. Acad. Sci. Kept., 1919. 



