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Home/Historical IQ Tests/Whipple 1914
1910 · 2nd ed. 1914–15 · BaltimoreInteractive

Whipple's Manual: one book of directions for every laboratory.

By 1906 mental tests were scattered across dozens of journals, each run a different way, so nobody's results could be compared. Guy Montrose Whipple, then teaching educational psychology at Cornell, set out to fix that. His 1910 manual gave 54 tests with apparatus, exact directions and earlier results. The enlarged second edition came out in two parts, in 1914 and 1915.

Browse the contents →Try the tapping test
Manual of Mental and Physical Tests
A book of directions compiled with special reference to the experimental study of school children in the laboratory or classroom
GUY MONTROSE WHIPPLE
BALTIMORE · WARWICK & YORK · 1910 · 534 PP. · $2.50
Title, subtitle, page count and price from library and review records; layout re-set.
THE PROBLEM IT SOLVED

“No recognized standards of procedure and none of performance”

That is how Whipple's preface describes the state of testing. Different investigators' results had seldom been compared, and where their methods differed, comparison was impossible. He judged that the time had come to take stock and systematise what was available.

He began preparing what he planned as a small handbook in March 1906. Four years later it ran to 534 pages.

54tests in 1910Grouped under nine headings, each with directions and earlier results.
534pagesThe 1910 volume; the second edition ran to 365 + 336 pages.
37pages on statisticsThe section a 1911 reviewer called one of its most important.
4years to writeFrom the first notes in March 1906 to publication in 1910.
EDITIONS

One volume, then two

One volume, 534 pages, $2.50, from Warwick & York in Baltimore. It gave 54 tests, grouped under nine headings, with directions, earlier results and a 37-page section on handling data.Sources [1][2][3]
WHAT WAS IN IT

Nine groups of tests, from skull calipers to imagination

Pick a group to see the tests and apparatus listed under it. The nine headings come from the 1911 review [1]. Anthropometric and attention items are from the 1910 contents [2]; motor and sensory items follow summaries of the 1914 contents and should be checked against the book. Where no list was available, only the heading is shown.

Sensory capacityPART I · 1914
How finely the senses discriminate, from eyesight to touch and pain.
Visual acuityHeterophoriaColour-blindnessDiscrimination of brightnessAuditory acuityDiscrimination of pitchLifted weightsPressureSensitivity to painDual cutaneous impressions
APPARATUS NAMED
Monoyer test-typeVerhoeff's astigmatic chartMaddox multiple rodPolitzer's acoumeterSeashore's audiometerTuning forks (Whipple and Titchener)Whipple's pressure-pain balanceJastrow's improved esthesiometer
37 PAGES ON STATISTICS
Handling the numbers

A 1911 review singled out the 37-page section on handling data as one of the book's most important parts, because analysis was where many would-be testers stumbled. The second edition opens with a worked example: the grip strength of 50 boys, in hectograms, and the values derived from it.

WHO IT WAS FOR
School children, laboratory or classroom

The subtitle aims it at teachers and investigators studying school children. Each test came with background, methods advice and earlier investigators' results, often sorted by age and sex, such as the pain thresholds of 50 boys and 50 girls at each age.

BRIDGE TO BINET
From laboratory tests to scales

Part II closes with a note on serial graded tests for developmental diagnosis, the Binet-style age scales. In 1914 Whipple also published his English translation of William Stern's The Psychological Methods of Testing Intelligence, the book that introduced the mental quotient.

PHYSICAL AND MOTOR CAPACITY

Tapping: speed, then fatigue

Tapping appears in Part I alongside grip, aiming, tracing and steadiness. The usual record was the number of taps in successive short periods, so you could see both speed and the falling-off of a tired hand. Tap the plate for 30 seconds.

A browser version: clicks or touches instead of a tapping board, and no 1914 norms. Results are for comparing your own runs.
00–5s
05–10s
010–15s
015–20s
020–25s
025–30s
Each bar is one 5-second period, the way a tapping record was read.
GUY MONTROSE WHIPPLE · 1876–1941

A Titchener student who moved into education

1876Born 12 June in Danvers, Massachusetts.
1897A.B., Brown University; then a year as scholar and assistant in psychology at Clark University.
1898–1902Assistant in psychology at Cornell; Ph.D. 1900 under Edward B. Titchener, who reportedly thought little of his interest in applied work.
1902–1914Teaches the science and art of education at Cornell, rising to assistant professor of educational psychology. Writes the Manual.
1914Associate professor of education at the University of Illinois (full professor 1915). Publishes his translation of Stern's book on intelligence testing.
1919–1925Professor of Experimental Education and Director of the Bureau of Tests and Measurements, University of Michigan.
to 1941Secretary of the National Society for the Study of Education and editor of its yearbooks, including Intelligence Tests and Their Use (1922) and Intelligence: Its Nature and Nurture (1940).
1941Dies 1 August, aged 65.

Career dates follow his Wikipedia biography [7] and library authority records (1876–1941) [3]; they were not checked against university records for this revision.

REFERENCES
  1. [1]Review of Manual of Mental and Physical Tests (1910). American Physical Education Review, 16(2), 1911.tandfonline.com
  2. [2]Whipple, G. M. (1910). Manual of Mental and Physical Tests: preface and contents (Google Books record).books.google.com
  3. [3]HathiTrust catalogue: Manual of mental and physical tests (1910; similar items include 1921 printings).hathitrust.org
  4. [4]Whipple, G. M. (1914). Part I: Simpler Processes, 365 pp. (bookseller record).abebooks.com
  5. [5]Whipple, G. M. (1915). Part II: Complex Processes, 336 pp.: publisher's description (Google Books).books.google.com
  6. [6]Two-volume set, second edition revised, 1914 and 1915 (bookseller record).commoncrowbooks.com
  7. [7]Wikipedia. Guy Montrose Whipple.en.wikipedia.org

Editorial record: new page in this project, built from library catalogues, publishers' descriptions, published tables of contents, a 1911 review and biographical notices. The manual is digitised but was not read cover to cover, so no per-test norms are reproduced.

KEEP EXPLORING
1884 · Where the first chapters came fromGalton's Anthropometric LaboratoryHeight, grip and sensory discrimination, the kind of measures Whipple's anthropometric chapters standardised.1919 · An audiometer in the manualSeashore's Measures of Musical TalentsSeashore's audiometer and pitch data appear in Whipple's sensory chapters.1905 · Serial graded testsBinet-SimonThe age-scale approach Whipple's Part II closes with.1890 · Earlier batteriesCattell's Mental TestsThe sensory and motor batteries whose scattered methods the manual set out to unify.
Part of the Historical IQ Tests Archive. Editorial content under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Standard directions, comparable scores.

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