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.
The 7 subtests
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All test materials and historical content on this page are transcribed from: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. Read it on Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/psychologicalexa00yerk.
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