THE TEACHER'S ESTIMATION OF THE GENERAL 
INTELLIGENCE OF SCHOOL CHILDREN. 
By H. WAITE, M.A., B.Sc. 
(i) Introductory. A number of articles have recently appeared on the value 
of the teacher's estimate of the General Intelligence of School Children, and in 
several the writers have rather hastily come to the conclusion that those estimates 
are practically worthless. It is difficult to understand why the teacher's claim 
should be so lightly set aside when we consider that his life is spent in educating 
the young; he is daily in close touch with them, observing them constantly in 
their efforts to grasp new ideas and to grapple with new problems, and fortified at 
the outset with a preparation for his work in which a study of the child-mind has 
been by no means neglected, he can hardly fail to acquire the power of judging, 
with a good degree of accuracy, the mental capacity of those who pass through his 
hands. The teacher's judgment is usually given, too, after observations extending 
over a period of many weeks ; he is thus able to take into account the effects 
of memory, perseverance, environment and other factors which in their results are 
closely connected with the intelligence. It is almost, if not quite, impossible to make 
due allowance for these when testing the intelligence by methods which are based 
on answers given by the child to a series of questions during an interview which 
may last only a few minutes. Anyone who seriously considers the question is 
bound to admit that few, if any, are better fitted to form an estimate of the 
intelligence of a child than that child's teachers. When such estimates have been 
collected and compared with the results of various tests of general intelligence, 
a high coefficient of correlation is obtained. 
This paper has been written with a view of investigating the teacher's claim. 
The numbers dealt with are small, and the results would in consequence be of 
little value if it were not that they agree very closely with those of other recent 
investigations, and hence tend to confirm the view that the teacher's opinion is 
at least worthy of consideration in questions connected with the intelligence of 
children. 
One of the best measures of the intelligence of a child is the position he takes 
in his form at school, both for the ordinary work of the term and also in examina- 
