About the Pintner-Cunningham Primary Mental Test
By 1923 the major US group intelligence tests covered grade 3 and above (NIT 1920, Otis 1918, Haggerty 1921) but did not work well with pre-reading children in kindergarten through grade 2. The Pintner-Cunningham was designed specifically for this gap.
The test had seven subtests: matching pictures, identifying pictures by category, finding pictures with missing parts, finding pictures with absurdities, copying simple figures, picture analogies, and simple counting. All items used pictures with examiner instructions; no reading was required.
The Pintner-Cunningham was widely adopted by US school districts in the 1920s and 1930s. Its design directly influenced the later California Test of Mental Maturity Primary Level (1936) and many subsequent kindergarten and first-grade screening instruments.
The 7 subtests
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Sample items at first-grade difficulty.
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Source
All test materials and historical content on this page are transcribed from:
Pintner, R. & Cunningham, B. V. (1923). Pintner-Cunningham Primary Mental Test. Yonkers-on-Hudson, NY: World Book Company.
Public domain. The Pintner-Cunningham was Rudolf Pintner's third intelligence test (after the 1917 Pintner-Paterson and the 1920 Non-Language Mental Test) and was specifically aimed at the K-2 grade range that other tests did not cover well.
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