About the Dearborn Group Tests of Intelligence
Walter Dearborn was the most prominent intelligence-testing figure at Harvard in the 1910s and 1920s. His Group Tests of Intelligence were developed parallel to (and competing with) the Otis Group Intelligence Scale and the National Intelligence Tests. Dearborn's tests had a particular strength in their reading and verbal items - reflecting his earlier work on reading psychology.
The Dearborn battery consisted of three series: Series A for grades 1-3 (mostly picture items, examiner instructions), Series B for grades 4-8 (paper-and-pencil multiple choice), and Series C for high school (more demanding verbal items). All three forms shared a common scoring scale so children's progress could be tracked across grade levels.
The Dearborn was widely used in New England and Mid-Atlantic schools through the 1930s. It was eventually displaced by the Otis Quick-Scoring (1936) and the California Test of Mental Maturity (1936), but the Dearborn manual is still cited in psychometric history as an early example of well-designed grade-graded testing.
The 5 subtests
Take the interactive subset
Sample items at grade 6-7 difficulty.
No data leaves your browser.
Source
All test materials and historical content on this page are transcribed from:
Dearborn, W. F. (1920). Dearborn Group Tests of Intelligence. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Public domain. Walter Dearborn (1878-1955) was Director of Harvard's Psycho-Educational Clinic and was instrumental in establishing intelligence testing in New England school systems. Read it on Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/manualofdirectio01dear.
Want a modern IQ score?
The Dearborn Group Tests of Intelligence is a historical artifact. For a contemporary IQ score using modern norms, take our modern full IQ test.
Take the Modern IQ Test