James Mckeen Cattell's Mental Testing In The US Army

As we known as, “mental test” concept originated by Galton. He believed that he could measure the person’s sensory capacity by the mental test. He collected a huge data from people. He also observed animals in the zoo. Galton used “photometer” for measuring precision with which a subject could match two spots of color. Most of his test served as prototypes but then it served in laboratory. His major work is started in 1884; he collected data from 9.000 people. His work was about collective mental resources of British population. He worked on two basic problems that include diversity of associations of ideas and reaction time. However Galton originated the mental test first, James McKeen Cattell developed first “mental test”. Cattell impressed …show more content…
Also this period is the starting time of World War 1. During WW1 USA government wanted to measure some skills of their soldiers so Yerkes who is the head of American Psychological Association came up with the intelligence test called U.S Army Intelligence Test. The main aim of the Army Intelligence Tests was Group Examinations Alpha and Beta, designed to administer to groups of recruits by trained psychological examiners. The transformation from the pre-war individual intelligence scales to the group-administered examinations was made possible by the method of multiple-choice, which was credited to Otis (Samelson, 1987; Yerkes, 1921, pp. 299±300). Group Examination Alpha was designed for the assessment of literate English speakers and Group Examination Beta for the minority of recruits who were illiterate or non-prescient in English. The complementary missions of the Alpha and Beta examinations in the army-testing program paralleled the roles of the Binet-Simon scale and performance tests in individual intelligence testing. Both the Alpha and Beta examinations were point scales consisting of a series of subtests that could be administered in less than one