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Public Domain · 1925

Detroit First-Grade Intelligence Test: Pre-reading group IQ test

Group intelligence test designed specifically for first-graders (ages 5-7). Items use pictures and minimal text since most first-graders are not yet fluent readers. Widely used by the Detroit Public Schools and many other US districts to identify children needing early intervention.

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About the Detroit First-Grade Intelligence Test

By the mid-1920s, US schools wanted to identify children needing extra support as early as possible. The Stanford-Binet could be used individually but took 45-60 minutes per child. Group tests like the Otis required reading ability that 5-7-year-olds did not yet have. The Detroit First-Grade Test was designed to fill the gap.

Items use pictures of common objects (dog, hat, house, etc.) and require the child to make various judgments: which thing is biggest, which thing comes next in a sequence, which thing matches a given category. The examiner reads instructions aloud; the child marks answers on the test booklet with a pencil. Total testing time is about 25 minutes.

The Detroit Test was widely used in US schools through the 1940s. It influenced subsequent kindergarten and first-grade screening instruments including the Metropolitan Readiness Test and modern instruments like the Bracken School Readiness Assessment.

The 3 subtests

#1
Picture identification Mark the picture that matches a category named by the examiner.
Interactive
#2
Picture comparison Pick the bigger / smaller / different picture.
Interactive
#3
Picture sequence What comes next in a series?
Interactive

Take the interactive subset

Sample first-grade items adapted from the 1925 Engel manual.

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About these items: These Detroit First-Grade Intelligence Test items are originally-written reconstructions in the tradition of the original 1925 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.

Source

All test materials and historical content on this page are transcribed from:

Engel, A. J. (1925). Detroit First-Grade Intelligence Test. Detroit, MI: Detroit Public Schools.

Public domain. Anna Engel was the supervising psychologist for the Detroit Public Schools' Bureau of Educational Research. The test was designed for the specific problem of cognitive screening at school entry (kindergarten or first grade), when children are too young for verbal group tests like the Otis or National Intelligence Tests.

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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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