Three people, one test division
All three authors worked at The Psychological Corporation, which published the battery in 1947.2,6
The eight tests
The 1990 fifth edition kept the same eight aptitudes as the first. Item counts and times below are for that edition; the source doesn't give figures for the last three.7,6
The only test that wasn't multiple-choice
Every other DAT test was multiple-choice. This one was a race: find the combination that matches the underlined one. The 1990 version had two 100-item parts of three minutes each.4,6
Invented items in the same format, 30 seconds, no norms. Not real DAT content.
Always issued in pairs
Each restandardization produced two parallel forms, so a student could be retested on fresh items.3
Part of the multiple-aptitude turn
Groundwork for multi-ability batteries began in the 1930s. The DAT arrived the same year as the government's General Aptitude Test Battery, two decades before the military's ASVAB.8 In 1948 Bennett and J. E. Doppelt published a paper on evaluating pairs of tests for guidance use: the logic of reading a profile.2
References
- [1]Bennett, G. K., Seashore, H. G., & Wesman, A. G. (1948). The Differential Aptitude Tests: Some comments by the authors. Occupations: The Vocational Guidance Journal. Wiley.doi:10.1002/j.2164-5892.1948.tb01449.x
- [2]Bennett, G. K., Seashore, H. G., & Wesman, A. G. (1956). The Differential Aptitude Tests: An overview. The Personnel and Guidance Journal. Wiley.doi:10.1002/j.2164-4918.1956.tb01710.x
- [3]Differential Aptitude Test (DAT). Careershodh (2024).careershodh.com
- [4]Differential Aptitude Test. RehabMeasures Database, Shirley Ryan AbilityLab.sralab.org
- [5]Differential Aptitude Tests (DAT). APA Dictionary of Psychology.dictionary.apa.org
- [6]Differential Aptitude Test. In Encyclopedia of Measurement and Statistics. SAGE.methods.sagepub.com
- [7]Description of the Differential Aptitude Test battery (fifth edition). Coláiste Iognáid guidance document (PDF).colaisteiognaid.ie (PDF)
- [8]Historical framework: aptitudes. The Ball Foundation.ballfoundation.org
Related historical tests
The Army built its own multi-aptitude battery at almost the same moment. Where the DAT gave a counsellor a profile to discuss, the ACB turned test scores into aptitude-area composites that routed recruits into groups of Army jobs from 1949.
The classroom version of Thurstone's seven-factor battery, published six years before the DAT. It had already put a profile of separate ability scores in front of teachers, the idea the DAT extended to guidance counselling.
The theory behind batteries like the DAT: seven primary abilities (verbal, number, spatial, memory, word fluency, perceptual speed and reasoning) rather than a single general factor. Several DAT tests map onto these factors.
The first major standardized interest inventory and the other half of mid-century career counselling. Strong measured what a student liked; the DAT measured what a student could learn to do.
Another Psychological Corporation test from the same years. Wechsler's memory scale combined seven short subtests into a single Memory Quotient, the opposite of the DAT's eight separate scores.
The Army test given to about 12 million recruits in World War II. DAT co-author Alexander Wesman was a consultant to the Army's Adjutant General's Office in 1944–45, the office behind Army personnel testing.