Ebbinghaus Completion Test: First completion-based IQ test

About the Ebbinghaus Completion Test

In 1897, the German city of Breslau (now Wrocław) was investigating fatigue in schoolchildren. Were children too tired in the afternoon to learn effectively? The city commissioned Hermann Ebbinghaus to develop a test that could measure cognitive performance differences between morning and afternoon school hours.

Ebbinghaus's approach was elegant: he gave children a printed passage with some words removed and dashes in their place, and asked them to fill in the missing words. He argued that this task required all the major cognitive operations - reading, comprehension, vocabulary, judgment about what makes sense - so a child's performance would reflect general cognitive functioning.

The Breslau study confirmed that schoolchildren were less able to fill in the missing words in the afternoon than in the morning (the 'fatigue effect' is real but small). More importantly, Ebbinghaus's method showed that brief paper-and-pencil tasks could meaningfully measure individual cognitive differences. Trabue (1916) standardized the completion-test approach for American schools, and every modern test that uses sentence completion (SAT verbal, GRE verbal, clinical neuropsych assessments) traces back to this 1897 paper.

The 1 subtests

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A reconstructed Ebbinghaus-style completion item.

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Source

All test materials and historical content on this page are transcribed from:

Ebbinghaus, H. (1897). Über eine neue Methode zur Prüfung geistiger Fähigkeiten und ihre Anwendung bei Schulkindern. Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane, 13, 401-459.

Public domain. Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850-1909) was the pioneer of experimental memory research (the 'forgetting curve' is his) and an important figure in early German experimental psychology. The 1897 paper was published in German; the methodology was widely adapted in English-language psychometrics by 1900.