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Public Domain · 1920 · Non-Verbal

Pintner Non-Language Mental Test: Group non-verbal school test

Group-administered non-verbal intelligence test for school use, derived from Pintner's earlier work on the deaf. The 1920 Pintner Non-Language Mental Test brought non-verbal cognitive assessment into ordinary classrooms - particularly valuable for non-English-speaking immigrants and children with hearing impairments.

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About the Pintner Non-Language Mental Test

The 1917 Pintner-Paterson Performance Scale required one-on-one administration with physical materials. For schools and clinics that wanted to screen large groups of non-English-speaking children, this was too slow. Pintner's 1920 Non-Language Mental Test solved the problem by adapting the non-verbal items into a printed test booklet that could be administered to an entire class at once.

The 1920 test had six subtests: digit-symbol substitution, picture completion, picture absurdities, paper form board, picture analogies, and number sequence. All were administered with pantomime and demonstration; no spoken or written language was required.

The Pintner Non-Language Mental Test was widely used in US schools that served immigrant populations through the 1930s and 1940s. It directly influenced the design of the Army Beta Form Two (1941) and the Cattell Culture Fair Intelligence Test (1949) - both of which used the same group-administered non-verbal philosophy.

The 6 subtests

#1
Digit-Symbol Substitution Key shows symbols for digits 1-9; replace digits in a sequence with their symbols.
Pencil + Paper
#2
Picture Completion Pictures with missing parts; identify what is missing.
Interactive
#3
Picture Absurdities Pictures showing something illogical; identify the absurdity.
Interactive
#4
Paper Form Board Cut shapes that fit a target shape.
Visual
#5
Picture Analogies Visual A:B :: C:? analogies.
Visual
#6
Number Sequence Continue a number pattern.
Interactive

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Sample non-verbal items.

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About these items: These Pintner Non-Language Mental Test 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.

Source

All test materials and historical content on this page are transcribed from:

Pintner, R. (1920). Pintner Non-Language Mental Test. Yonkers-on-Hudson, NY: World Book Company.

Public domain. This 1920 group-administered version built on Pintner's earlier individually-administered Performance Scale (1917).

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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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