58 PSYCHOLOGICAL METHODS OP TESTING INTELLIGENCE 



close connection between intellectual ability and 

 school ability: good pupils are forthwith regarded 

 as intelligent, and good school work is, with a cer- 

 tain obviousness, expected of intelligent children, 

 poor school work of the poor groups. So long, of 

 course, as we had no special means of testing intelli- 

 gence, there was no foundation on which to build up 

 more exact knowledge of these interrelations: we 

 had to content ourselves with opinions and with the 

 generalization of occasional observations. 



But now we are beginning to get on firmer ground. 

 Tests of intelligence have already taught us that the 

 relations between intelligence and school ability are 

 by no means so strict and uniform as most persons 

 had thought. Just here we are concerned with the 

 conclusions reached by the Binet-Simon method with 

 normal children, but we shall encounter the same re- 

 sult later on in two places (II, 4c and III, 3). 



We have two measures for the school capacity of a 

 child that we want to compare with his intelligence 

 his pedagogical age and his marks. 



Pedagogical age is the normal age of the class to 

 which the child belongs. If we assume that school- 

 ing begins at 6, then the pedagogical age of a class 

 that is just entering upon its fourth school year is 

 6 + 3 = 9 years. If there is in this class a child 11 

 years old, he then has a pedagogical retardation of 

 two years, while an 8-year old classmate has an ad- 

 vancement, or acceleration, of one year. The latter 

 is very rare with us, on account of the exact way in 

 which promotions are regulated; cases of it appear 

 mostly when a child enters after private prepara- 

 tion or from another school. Outside of Germany 



