Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [153]
The Army Testing Program, however, had far greater impact outside the military than within it. It made America more conscious than ever of the practical applications of psychology, specifically those derived from mental measurement. (James McKeen Cattell said that the war had put psychology “on the map,” and G. Stanley Hall that it had given psychology an invaluable redirection toward the practical rather than the “pure.”)
The Alpha, in particular, led to an explosive expansion of intelligence testing, which rapidly became a multimillion-dollar industry. Within a few years of the war’s end, a number of Alpha-type paper-and-pencil intelligence tests were being marketed to school administrators throughout the country. One of the most successful, appearing in 1923, was put together by Terman, Yerkes, and three co-workers, under the auspices of the National Research Council, which advertised it as “the direct result of the application of the army testing methods to school needs.” By the end of the decade it had been given to seven million American school-children.52 Another major success was the Scholastic Aptitude Test, developed by Carl C. Brigham, a colleague of Yerkes’, from Army models. Testing became prevalent in schools, colleges, the military services, institutions of all sorts, and various segments of industry.
The widespread use of intelligence testing was given further impetus by statistical evidence that the tests measured not just a series of separate mental aptitudes but an innate core of mental ability or “general intelligence.” Charles Spearman, an English psychologist and statistician, had shown that many mental abilities are correlated. (A person who does well in vocabulary, for instance, is likely to do well in arithmetic and other subtests.) He took this to indicate that an inherent general intelligence, which he called g, underlay all the specific abilities. Even if intelligence tests relied in part on learning, the correlations implied the existence of an innate ability to learn.
This provided additional justification for intelligence testing in the schools, which by the 1930s, both in the United States and in Great Britain, were classifying pupils early in the educational process and assigning them to broad programs preparatory for higher education or to narrow “vocational” or “technical” programs readying them for blue-collar jobs. In America this was called “tracking” and in Great Britain “streaming.”53
The growth of testing was not limited to the measurement of intelligence. During the 1920s and 1930s many other scales were developed to measure musical, mechanical, figural, verbal, mathematical, and other abilities, and a number of vocational aptitudes. Even though intelligence testing itself came under attack as early as the 1920s, Binet’s approach to mental testing had opened up a vast new area of psychological research, and the Army Alpha had transformed his cumbersome and costly procedure into one that was easy and inexpensive enough to be the psychological equivalent of the assembly line.
The IQ Controversy
Intelligence testing did not long maintain its unquestioned status. From 1921 on, when Yerkes edited a massive report of the findings of the Army Testing Program, intelligence testing came under attack by various advocates and spokespersons of the underprivileged, who claimed that it measured not innate intelligence but acquired knowledge and cultural values and therefore was biased in favor of the dominant white middle class and against the lower classes and immigrants.
The Alpha, they charged, measured not native intelligence but the kinds of knowledge possessed by men with schooling and a degree of sophistication. Here, for instance, is a typical example of the culturally biased kind of question:
The Knight engine is used in the
—Packard,
—Stearns,
—Lozier,