PAPERS ON PSYCHOLOGY AND EDUCATION 3S9 



to our knowledge about education. Many masters' theses 

 make minor contributions. 



What are the net results of all this activity.' "What 

 additions have been made to our knowledge of educa- 

 tion? What has been the effect of educational research 

 upon school practice ? Are we developing a group of 

 competent and reliable research workers I Is the work 

 being done increasing in quality as well as in amount? 

 What has been the effect of educational research upon 

 the attitude of teachers and of others not engaged in 

 carrying on investigations? It would be presumptions 

 for me to attempt a final answer to these questions, but 

 a number of facts which have seemed significant and 

 perhaps indicative of a general trend have recently come 

 to my observation. Some of these facts I shall pass on 

 to you with the hope that I may stimulate you to think 

 about some vital questions. In the time at my disposal, 

 I propose to cite illustrations of four sources of waste 

 in educational research. 



In a doctorial dissertation recently accepted and pub- 

 lished by one of our foremost graduate departments in 

 education, the investigator set for herself the problem 

 of making an inventory of the content of the minds of 

 children of six and seven years of mental age. Obviously 

 the first step in dealing with this problem was to locate 

 a representative group of children whose mental ages 

 fell in the interval from six years and no months to seven 

 years and eleven months. This was done by administer- 

 ing the Stanford Revision of the Binet Test to certain 

 groups of children. Later they were given also the Her- 

 ring Revision of the Binet Test. The average of the two 

 measures was used as the criterion of mental age, al- 

 though the results of the second test do not appear to 

 have been used in determining what children should be 

 chosen for the investigation. For reasons which are not 

 made clear in the report, the investigator later adminis- 

 tered four group intelligence tests and eleven specialized 

 individual tests, and calculated from the scores thus ob- 

 tained a number of coefficients of correlation and regres- 

 sion coefficients. 



