EDU 403 Measurement and Evaluation - National Open University ...

EDU 403 MEASUREMENT AND EVALUATION
occasion and from person to person. This means that there is a variation
in the simple reaction time or a measure of the time required to react to a
simple stimulus.
In 1863, a half cousin of Charles Darwin, Sir Francis Galton worked on
individual differences. In 1883 he published a book titled inquires into
the Human Faculty and Development. His work was regarded as the
beginning of mental tests. Have you heard of his tests? In 1884, Galton
opened an anthropometric laboratory to collect the characteristic
measurements of people within the same period Mckeen Cathel, an
American Psychologist was also studying individual differences in
primary physical terms.
These were the earliest recorded history of testing. But you will note
that early measurement approaches in history both written and oral,
were informal. The first written tests were the informal examinations
used by the Chinese to recruit people into the civil service. This was
about 2200BC.
The oral examinations conducted by Socrates in the 5 th century B.C were
informal. In America, educational achievement tests were used for
assessment through oral examinations before 1815. You have read about
Galton, James Cattel etc and their roles in the history of test
development. There are others, let us briefly mention very few of them
in this section. Karl Pearson, developed the Pearson product-moment
correlation coefficient which is useful in checking the reliability and
validity of standardized tests.
Edward L. Thorndike was a former student of Cattels. He made major
contributions in achievement testing.
By 1904, Alfred Binet had established himself as France’s premier
psychologist, expert in human individual differences. He studied the
differences between bright and dull children. In 1904, he developed a
test for measuring intelligence of children with his assistant Theodore
Simons. This test is called Binet – Simons intelligence test. In 1916,
Louis Terman and his associates at Stanford University revised the
Binet-Simon scale and brought out the Stamford-Binet version.
Group-tests development started during the World War I when the need
to measure the intelligence of soldiers so as to assign them to different
tasks and operations arose. As a result group of psychologists including
Yerkes, R.M and Otis, A. developed the Army Alpha, which is a written
group intelligence test, and Army Beta, which is the individual nonverbal
intelligence test. Others are: David Wechsler who developed
series of individual intelligence scales from 1939 to 1967;
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