362 ILLINOIS STATE ACADEMY OF SCIENCE 



A SERIES OF STUDIES ON THE RELATIVE VALUE 

 OF PSYCHOLOGICAL TESTS AND TEACHERS' 

 JUDGMENTS AS A BASIS FOR MEASUR- 

 ING PUPIL MENTAL ABILITY 



F. E. Clerk 



New Trier Township High School 

 Kenilworth 



introduction 



No single factor in education in recent years has been 

 so widely heralded as the panacea for so many of our 

 educational ills as psychological and standardized tests 

 and measurements, and perhaps no single factor ever 

 came into widely accepted use in public education with 

 quite the same degree of apparent justification for de- 

 pendability and validity. The very origin and develop- 

 ment of these tests seemed to be a guarantee that they 

 would do all that even the most enthusiastic of their pro- 

 ponents claimed for them. Arising as they did under 

 scientific auspices, further developed according to the 

 best of scientific educational procedure, it seemed that 

 there was little else to do but accept them as a part of 

 regular school practice and make the best possible use 

 of the results. 



Many school .systems throughout the country have 

 adopted the use of some of the now over two hundred 

 and seventy different varieties of tests in their class- 

 rooms, and some school systems have gone even so far 

 as to use them exclusively as a basis for classifying, 

 grading and promoting individual school children and 

 judging the quality of the teaching and the effectiveness 

 of the school supervision. This practice presents a prob- 

 lem of which it is the ymrpose of this study to attempt 

 to find at least a partial solution. The problem involved 

 is concerned with the reliability of the average teacher's 

 judgment of the mental ability of his pupils, as compared 

 with the use of standardized tests for the same purpose. 

 It is not accepted as a proven thesis, as far as this paper 

 is concerned, that "Intelligence" should be the sole 

 basis for classifying, grading or promoting pupils, 



