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Public Domain · 1918 · Military

Wells Army Individual Performance Scale: WWI individual performance scale

Individually-administered performance examination used in WWI for recruits who could not take the Army Alpha or Beta - typically due to attention problems, language barriers severe enough to defeat Beta, or apparent intellectual disability. Designed by F.L. Wells at McLean Hospital and incorporated into the standard Army psychological battery.

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About the Wells Army Individual Performance Scale

The Army psychological program had three main testing instruments: the Alpha (verbal, group), the Beta (non-verbal, group), and a battery of individual examinations for cases where group testing was not feasible. F.L. Wells designed the individual performance scale used in this third category.

The Wells scale included subtests adapted from the Stanford-Binet (vocabulary, comprehension, similarities), the Healy Pictorial Completion Test, the Knox Cube Test, form board tasks from the Pintner-Paterson scale, and several Wells-original items. Total testing time was about 45 minutes per recruit - much slower than the group tests but able to handle cases the group tests could not.

The Wells scale is described in detail in Volume XV of the National Academy of Sciences Memoirs (Yerkes 1921). Items are reproduced with administration procedures and scoring. Approximately 250,000 WWI recruits received individual examination using the Wells procedure.

About this interactive version: The Wells scale requires individual administration with physical materials (Healy pictures, Knox cubes, form boards) and is not browser-administrable.

The 7 subtests

#1
Vocabulary (Stanford-Binet adapted) Definitions of graded words.
Examiner Required
#2
Comprehension (Stanford-Binet adapted) 'What's the thing for you to do when...' situational items.
Examiner Required
#3
Healy Pictorial Completion Identify missing parts in pictures.
Visual
#4
Knox Cube Imitation Reproduce tapping sequences on 4 cubes.
Visual + Motor
#5
Form Board (Pintner-Paterson) Place cutouts in matching slots.
Form Board
#6
Picture Arrangement Arrange cards in story-coherent order. Wells-original; modern WAIS Picture Arrangement subtest descends from this.
Visual
#7
Block Design (early) Early form of block-design assembly; predecessor of Kohs (1923) and modern WAIS Block Design.
Visual + Motor

Take the full 50-item test

F.L. Wells' 1918 Army Individual Examination. Used for recruits who failed the Army Alpha but couldn't take the Army Beta (illiterate AND non-English-speaking). 50 individually-administered items requiring an examiner.

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About these items: These Wells Army Individual Performance Scale items are originally-written reconstructions in the tradition of the original 1918 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:

Wells, F. L. (1918). Individual examination at the Surgeon General's Office. In R. M. Yerkes (Ed.), Psychological Examining in the United States Army (1921), Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. XV.

Public domain - US government work. The Wells scale was used at Army camps when group testing was not feasible. F.L. Wells himself was at McLean Hospital in Massachusetts before and after the war.

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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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The instrument documented above is a historical document. Modern IQ scoring uses contemporary norms (mean 100, SD 15). Our free full IQ test is available separately.