National Intelligence Tests: Army Alpha for schools

About the National Intelligence Tests

The end of WWI left the American psychological community with two important assets: the Army Alpha and Army Beta, which had been used to test 1.7 million recruits, and a now-trained generation of psychologists who knew how to administer and score group cognitive tests. The National Research Council, which had coordinated the wartime testing effort, asked five of the most prominent educational psychologists to adapt the Army methodology for civilian schools.

The committee was a who's-who of early American psychometrics: M.E. Haggerty (University of Minnesota), Lewis Terman (Stanford, author of the Stanford-Binet), Edward Thorndike (Columbia, the founder of educational psychology), Guy Whipple (Illinois, author of the standard manual of mental tests), and Robert Yerkes (Harvard, who had chaired the Army Alpha committee).

The result, published in 1920, was the National Intelligence Tests. There were two scales (A and B) and several forms of each, all designed for grades 3 to 8. Each form contained five subtests: arithmetical reasoning, sentence completion, logical selection (a kind of analogy), synonym-antonym, and information. Total testing time was about 30 minutes - much shorter than the Army Alpha but using the same fundamental design.

NIT was widely adopted: by 1925, it had been administered to several million American schoolchildren. It was the most-used group intelligence test in US schools for most of the 1920s, eventually being surpassed by Otis's Quick-Scoring Mental Ability Test in the mid-1930s and then by various achievement test batteries.

The 5 subtests

Take the interactive subset

Sample items in the original NIT format. The 1920 manual indicates these are representative of items used at grade 5-6 difficulty.

No data leaves your browser.

Source

All test materials and historical content on this page are transcribed from:

Haggerty, M. E., Terman, L. M., Thorndike, E. L., Whipple, G. M. & Yerkes, R. M. (1920). National Intelligence Tests: Scales A and B. Yonkers-on-Hudson, NY: World Book Company.

Public domain (published before 1929). The tests were produced under the auspices of the National Research Council and represented the first major attempt to standardize school cognitive testing across the United States. They directly preceded both the Otis Higher Examination (1922) and the various achievement-test batteries that came to dominate American education from the late 1920s onward.