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Public Domain · 1920

Dearborn Group Tests of Intelligence: Harvard's school IQ battery

Group intelligence test for school use, developed at Harvard by Walter Dearborn and adapted from his earlier work on reading. The Dearborn battery had Series A, B, and C - covering kindergarten through high school - with each form designed for a specific grade range.

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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

#1
Vocabulary Word definitions of graded difficulty.
Interactive
#2
Reading Comprehension Read a passage; answer questions about it.
Paper Test
#3
Arithmetic Reasoning Word problems.
Interactive
#4
Sentence Completion Fill the blank.
Interactive
#5
Disarranged Sentences True/false unscrambling.
Interactive

Take the interactive subset

Sample items at grade 6-7 difficulty.

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About these items: These Dearborn Group Tests of Intelligence items are originally-written reconstructions in the tradition of the original 1920 test, NOT verbatim copies of the historical items. Where the original is a 1-on-1 oral or physical-apparatus test (e.g., examiner shows a card, child draws a shape), we have adapted the format to self-administered multiple choice. See the original source for the authentic 1920-era items in their original administration format.

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.

Cite this page

This page is part of the Historical IQ Tests Archive. Editorial content, transcription notes, and curation are released under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0). Public-domain primary sources retain their public-domain status. BibTeX · RIS · CSL JSON

Historical test materials are obsolete and are not valid modern IQ assessments. This page is preserved for educational, research, and historiographic purposes.

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The instrument documented above is a historical document. Modern IQ scoring uses contemporary norms (mean 100, SD 15). Our free full IQ test is available separately.