390 ILLINOIS STATE ACADEMY OF SCIENCE 



A careful reading of the monograph fails to reveal any 

 use which was made of the additional data secured from 

 these tests or of the derived measures which were calcu- 

 lated from the resulting scores. Two tables of coefficients 

 of correlation are presented with the statement that 

 the relations and inter-relations shown are "food for 

 thought," but the report contains little or no evidence 

 that the investigator made any effort to masticate or 

 digest this "food." In fact, it is difficult for the reader 

 to conceive how these correlations might have contrib- 

 uted to the study of the problem under consideration. 

 One gets the impression that the giving of the tests and 

 the subsequent calculations are for ornamentation rather 

 than for any useful purpose. If one may be permitted to 

 read between the lines, he might say that the investi- 

 gator or her advisers believed that an acceptable doctor- 

 ial dissertation must contain some coefficients of corre- 

 lation and statistical formulae, and that in this case these 

 features were added somewhat as an afterthought in 

 order to meet these requirements. At least the reader 

 cannot escape the conviction that the returns upon a cer- 

 tain portion of the investment in this investigation yield- 

 ed only very meager returns if any at all. 



It is not always possible for an investigator to esti- 

 mate correctly in advance the value of all data collected, 

 and of the calculations which he may make. There will 

 necessarily be some scrapping of material in pioneer 

 work, but this published report has been described as 

 illustrative of a source of waste in educational research 

 which unfortunately is more prevalent than seems to be 

 justified. A careful definition of the problem and a 

 strict adherence to the limitations of this definition will 

 result in a mental reduction in the amount of useless data 

 collected and tabulated. 



The writer of a recent article gave a tabulation of the 

 intelligence quotients derived from a group intelligence 

 test. Several of the I. Q.'s were so low and others were 

 so high as to suggest the presence of errors in the scores 

 from which they were calculated. In the original article 

 no mention had been made of this possibility, but a few 

 months later a criticism was published in which the point 



