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Public Domain · 1923

Stanford Achievement Test: First unified achievement battery

The first American achievement test produced from a unified, theoretically grounded testing program. Stanford's Truman Kelley (statistician), Giles Ruch (educationalist), and Lewis Terman (IQ-test author) collaborated to build a battery covering reading, arithmetic, language, and other school subjects. Predecessor of every modern school accountability test.

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About the Stanford Achievement Test

By the early 1920s American schools were using a confusing assortment of independent achievement tests - separate tests for reading, separate for arithmetic, separate for spelling, each with its own scoring scale and norms. The Stanford Achievement Test was the first attempt to build a single integrated battery covering all the basic school subjects with uniform scoring.

The Stanford battery had nine subtests: Paragraph Meaning (reading comprehension), Word Meaning (vocabulary), Dictation (spelling), Language Usage (grammar), Arithmetic Computation, Arithmetic Reasoning, History and Civics, Geography, and Scientific Information. Each subtest produced a grade-equivalent score and a percentile rank. Children could be compared across subjects to identify strengths and weaknesses.

The Stanford Achievement Test was widely used in US schools through the 1950s. The Kelley/Ruch/Terman framework directly shaped Lindquist's Iowa Tests (1935), the California Achievement Test (1934), and the Metropolitan Achievement Tests (1932-present). The 'unified achievement battery' model that the Stanford originated is still the dominant form of US school testing today.

The 9 subtests

#1
Paragraph Meaning Reading comprehension.
Paper Test
#2
Word Meaning Vocabulary multiple choice.
Interactive
#3
Dictation (Spelling) Examiner reads words; subject writes them.
Audio + Paper
#4
Language Usage Grammar and sentence-structure items.
Interactive
#5
Arithmetic Computation Pure computation items.
Interactive
#6
Arithmetic Reasoning Word problems.
Interactive
#7
History and Civics Factual knowledge of US history.
Interactive
#8
Geography Factual geography.
Interactive
#9
Scientific Information Basic science knowledge.
Interactive

Take the interactive subset

Sample items at grade 6 difficulty (1923 Form B).

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About these items: These Stanford Achievement 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:

Kelley, T. L., Ruch, G. M. & Terman, L. M. (1923). Stanford Achievement Test. Yonkers-on-Hudson, NY: World Book Company.

Public domain. The Stanford trio was at the time the most authoritative educational psychology group in the United States. Terman was already famous for the Stanford-Binet (1916); Kelley was developing the modern statistical theory of educational measurement; Ruch was the practical test-development specialist.

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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

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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