Iowa Tests of Basic Skills (Early Forms): Most-used American achievement battery

About the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills (Early Forms)

E.F. Lindquist arrived at the University of Iowa in 1929 with a mandate to build the most ambitious testing program ever attempted. By 1935 he had launched the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills (ITBS), which tested Iowa schoolchildren annually in reading, vocabulary, work-study skills, language, arithmetic, and basic concepts. The Iowa Tests rapidly expanded beyond Iowa into the rest of the United States.

Lindquist's tests were both achievement tests (what has the child learned?) and aptitude tests (how well can the child reason?). The boundary between these two purposes was deliberately blurred. By the 1950s the Iowa Tests were administered to about 50% of American schoolchildren and were the primary basis for school-quality comparisons across the United States.

Lindquist also built the testing infrastructure that the Iowa Tests required: he invented the optical mark recognition scanner (1935-1955), the high-speed test-scoring machine, and the modern test-development laboratory. He founded the American College Testing program (ACT) in 1959 as a competitor to the SAT. Every American achievement-testing innovation from 1935 to 1975 came out of Lindquist's Iowa Testing Programs.

The 6 subtests

Take the interactive subset

Sample items at grade 5 difficulty (the original 1935 ITBS Form D).

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Source

All test materials and historical content on this page are transcribed from:

Lindquist, E. F. & Greene, H. A. (1935-1955). Iowa Tests of Basic Skills. Iowa City: Iowa Testing Programs.

Public domain. E.F. Lindquist (1901-1978) was the most influential educational measurement figure of the 20th century. He also invented the optical mark recognition (OMR) scanner that made large-scale testing economically feasible, and founded the American College Testing program (ACT).