ON THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE TEACHER'S 
APPRECIATION OF GENERAL INTELLIGENCE. 
By WALTER H. GILBY, B.Sc. with the assistance of KARL PEARSON, F.R.S. 
(1) Introductory. The object of the present investigation is to ascertain 
whether the judgment of the teacher made on a fairly long experience of his 
class has or has not a significance of its own. A recent writer has stated that 
it seems to him " that, to a great extent, and unless they are very carefully 
controlled, the teachers' judgments are relatively as well as absolutely valueless — 
i.e. that we cannot attach any great confidence even to the classification of one 
teacher of a single class. His judgment is probably affected to some extent by 
the age of his pupils*." This is one of those sweeping judgments, given apparently 
without any close study of the subject, with which one is only too familiar just 
now. It is perfectly possible to test the extent to which age affects the teacher's 
judgment of intelligence, and this has already been done several times. Although 
controls have been previously made of the accuracy of teachers' judgments by com- 
paring two or three teachers' independent opinions, it seemed desirable in view of 
such dogmatic assertions as the above to deal with the matter at some length and 
de novo. The method adopted in the present instance was to test the judgment 
of the class teacher, i.e. a single teacher, who had before him written definitions 
of each category of general intelligence, against the place and percentage of 
marks obtained by the same boy in an examination conducted by another and 
independent man. In order that there might be some approach to the conditions 
involved in the mass data provided by school inspections and surveys, data were 
obtained from eight schools and from 36 teachers who were willing to spend 
time and care upon the observations. 
(2) Class of Schools. The schools are primary schools of the usual county- 
council type. The characters of the different schools are as follows : 
School No. 1. This school is a comparatively new one. The pupils are 
children of fairly welbto-do tradespeople, civil servants, clerks, etc. There are 
very few poor children, and no children attending the school have free dinners. 
* G. U. Yule, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Vol. lxxiii. p. 550. 
