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Public Domain · 1923

Pintner-Cunningham Primary Mental Test: Group test for grades 1-2

Group intelligence test designed for first-grade through second-grade pupils. Rudolf Pintner (also author of the Non-Language Mental Test) collaborated with educator Bess Cunningham to produce a pre-reading group IQ test that became one of the most-used early-childhood screening instruments of the 1920s-1940s.

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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

#1
Picture Matching Match pictures that go together.
Interactive
#2
Picture Categorization Pick the picture that fits a category.
Interactive
#3
Missing-Part Pictures Find pictures with missing essential parts.
Interactive
#4
Absurd Pictures Find pictures showing something illogical.
Interactive
#5
Form Copying Copy simple geometric figures (circle, square, cross, diamond).
Drawing
#6
Picture Analogies Visual A:B :: C:? analogies.
Visual
#7
Simple Counting Count groups of objects up to 20.
Interactive

Take the interactive subset

Sample items at first-grade difficulty.

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About these items: These Pintner-Cunningham Primary Mental Test items are originally-written reconstructions in the tradition of the original 1923 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All test materials and historical content on this page are transcribed from:

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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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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