Pick a booklet and see which tests it holds
The tests ran in order of difficulty, and each test had anywhere from five to fifty items. Adjacent booklets shared tests, so a child retested a grade later took some of the same tests and some harder ones, scored on the same scale.
Short booklets for each grade, one long ruler underneath
A single booklet hard enough for seniors would bore and swamp first-graders; separate tests per grade would give scores that can't be compared. Kuhlmann had already produced his own revision of Binet's individual scale. The grade booklets carried that idea into group testing: everyone sat roughly ten tests suited to their grade, and the shared tests linked the booklets into one scale.
The manual's title promised ages six to maturity. The first-grade booklet was split by semester, an unusually fine division at the bottom of the range.
Pick an item type, then climb until you miss
Four steps from a spoken-instruction picture item to a booklet item an older student might meet. The point is the climb on one scale, not the items, which are written for this page.
Agreement with rival tests: .54 at the bottom, .77 at the top
A year after publication Kuhlmann compared the tests with seven others of the day, including the Otis and Detroit tests. Correlations ranged from .54 to .77 and rose with the age of the group. The Randolph College cataloguers could find no reliability coefficients for this version in the manual or the literature.
Only the endpoints of the range are reported in our source; the individual test-by-test values are not shown.
From grade booklets to seven lettered levels
Eighth-edition levels (Scholastic Testing Service, 1982): each has eight subtests, four mainly nonverbal and four verbal, reported as cognitive skills quotients. The publisher gives 50–75 minutes testing time.
Kuhlmann's titles at the same Minneapolis publisher
Rose G. Anderson is named as co-author on every edition from 1927 to 1982; we found no biography of her in the sources consulted.
Sources cited on this page
- [1]Peabody Journal of Education 6(1) (1928), “The new books on our shelf”: Kuhlmann, F., & Anderson, R. G. (1927). Intelligence Tests for Ages Six to Maturity: Instruction Manual. Educational Test Bureau.tandfonline.comUsed for: Hero manual title, authors, publisher, year.
- [2]Randolph College Psychology Collection (eHive): Kuhlmann-Anderson Intelligence Tests, 1927.ehive.comUsed for: 39 tests, item counts, grade windows, Kuhlmann 1928 correlations, missing reliabilities, kit contents.
- [3]University of Illinois SSHEL Test Collection: Kuhlmann titles.library.illinois.eduUsed for: 1927–30 and fourth-edition holdings, record sheets, Kuhlmann's other tests.
- [4]Kuhlmann, F. (1942). Kuhlmann-Anderson Intelligence Tests for Ages Six to Maturity: Instruction Manual (5th ed.). Educational Test Bureau.bookseller recordUsed for: Fifth edition, 131 pp.
- [5]WorldCat: Kuhlmann-Anderson Tests, Level G (8th ed., 1982). Scholastic Testing Service.worldcat.orgUsed for: Eighth edition kit, purpose statement.
- [6]ETS Test Collection annotated bibliographies (ERIC ED369800, ED369801).files.eric.ed.govUsed for: Eighth-edition levels, eight subtests, verbal/nonverbal split.
- [7]Scholastic Testing Service. Kuhlmann-Anderson Tests product page.stsme.comUsed for: Current levels table and testing time.
What changed in this revision
Built from collection catalogue records (Randolph College, University of Illinois), a 1928 book notice and later bibliographies. Neither the 1927 manual nor a booklet was read directly.
- ADDED1927 manual hero, a 39-test grade-window interactive, why the overlap mattered, the Randolph kit, Kuhlmann's 1928 .54–.77 comparison, editions 1927–1982 with eighth-edition levels, Kuhlmann's other tests, and 7 references.
- REMOVEDThe coverage chart against Otis and National Intelligence Tests, the six-subtest list, and K–12 claims for 1927. The 1927 tests started at grade I.
- FLAGGEDThe grade VIII–XII window (tests 30–39) is inferred, because our source's list is truncated.
- CORRECTEDAn earlier summary of this page in our working notes described a rebuild that had not been carried out, with claims of two forms and 400,000 copies. None of those claims appears here.
- KEPTThe climb-the-items exercise, relabelled as illustrative steps rather than specific grade booklets.
Related historical tests
Like Terman, Kuhlmann had revised Binet's individual scale. The grade booklets carry the same idea, tasks arranged by difficulty along one scale, into group testing.
Detroit's test was built for school entrants only. Kuhlmann-Anderson started in the same place with its first-semester booklet, then kept going to maturity.
Kuhlmann's 1928 study compared his tests with seven others of the day, including the Otis and Detroit. The NIT was the most widely used school group test of the decade.
Otis covered the grades with three broad booklets, Alpha, Beta and Gamma. Kuhlmann-Anderson used nine narrow, overlapping ones.
Henmon-Nelson took the opposite route: one mixed booklet per broad level, on one clock, scored on a self-marking sheet.
The Cognitive Abilities Test's overlapping levels and verbal/nonverbal split echo the Kuhlmann-Anderson eighth edition's design.