Whipple's Manual of Mental and Physical Tests: Pre-WWI testing compendium

About the Whipple's Manual of Mental and Physical Tests

By 1910 American psychologists had developed dozens of individual cognitive tests but there was no standard reference describing them all. Guy Whipple at the University of Illinois set out to fill this gap. His two-volume Manual (Part I: Simpler Processes, 1910; Part II: Complex Processes, 1915; consolidated 1914 edition) described approximately 50 individual tests with detailed administration procedures, normative data, and theoretical justifications.

Whipple's Manual covered tests of: simple reaction time, complex reaction time, attention and span, perception, association, memory (immediate, delayed, recognition, association), imagination, fatigue, suggestibility, motor learning, mental arithmetic, vocabulary, completion (Ebbinghaus), reasoning, judgment, and many others. For each test the Manual provided procedure, scoring, expected age norms, and references to the original publications.

The Whipple Manual was the standard American psychological-testing textbook from 1910 to 1925. It was used to train the first generation of professional psychometricians and was the basis for many of the items that ended up in the Army Alpha. Every test that we have built a separate page for (Cattell 1890, Galton 1884, Knox Cube, Healy, etc.) is also described in the Whipple Manual.

The 5 subtests

Source

All test materials and historical content on this page are transcribed from:

Whipple, G. M. (1914). Manual of Mental and Physical Tests, Part I: Simpler Processes and Part II: Complex Processes. Baltimore: Warwick & York.

Public domain. Guy Whipple (1876-1941) was at the University of Illinois and was one of the most prominent American psychological testers of the pre-WWI era. He served on the National Intelligence Tests committee with Terman, Thorndike, and Yerkes. Read it on Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/manualofmentalph15whipuoft.