Pintner-Paterson Scale of Performance Tests: First major non-verbal battery

About the Pintner-Paterson Scale of Performance Tests

By 1917 the Binet-Simon scale and Stanford-Binet were widely used in American psychological clinics, but they shared a major limitation: they relied heavily on language. A subject who could not understand spoken instructions, or who could not produce verbal responses, could not be tested. This excluded the deaf, recent immigrants (a large fraction of the WWI-era US population), and adults with limited literacy.

Rudolf Pintner had encountered this problem in his work with deaf schoolchildren at the Ohio School for the Deaf. He started developing non-verbal performance tasks in 1914, and his collaboration with Donald Paterson produced the integrated Performance Scale published in 1917. The scale used 15 subtests, all performance-based: form boards, picture completion, manikin assembly, cube reproduction, picture arrangement, and others.

The Pintner-Paterson approach was directly influential on Army Beta (1918), which adapted similar tasks for group administration. It also shaped David Wechsler's design philosophy in the 1930s; the Wechsler scales (1939 and onward) explicitly combine a verbal scale and a performance scale, with the performance scale drawing on the Pintner-Paterson lineage.

The 15 subtests

Source

All test materials and historical content on this page are transcribed from:

Pintner, R. & Paterson, D. G. (1917). A Scale of Performance Tests. New York: D. Appleton and Company. 241 pp.

Public domain (published before 1929). Rudolf Pintner was at Ohio State; Donald G. Paterson was at the University of Minnesota. The Performance Scale grew out of their work assessing deaf children, where the standard Binet scale was impossible to administer. The 1917 volume is the definitive description and includes normative data on 765 hearing children, 218 deaf children, and 73 adults. Read it on Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/ascaleperforman00pintgoog.