Norsworthy Mental Tests for Subnormal Children: First American standardized child IQ test

About the Norsworthy Mental Tests for Subnormal Children

Naomi Norsworthy's 1906 monograph "The Psychology of Mentally Deficient Children" included a standardized battery she had developed and normed on hundreds of New York City schoolchildren. The battery tested vocabulary, motor coordination, controlled association, attention span, memory for digits, perception of differences, and simple reasoning.

Norsworthy was the first American to publish age-graded norms allowing classification of a child as "subnormal" against typical performance for their chronological age. Her work directly informed Henry Goddard's decision to translate and adapt Binet's scale 2 years later, after Goddard visited Vineland Training School and saw the practical need her work addressed.

Norsworthy died young (39) and her work was overshadowed by the Goddard-Binet (1908) and Stanford-Binet (1916), but her 1906 monograph remains the first US-published practical intelligence test. She is also notable as one of the first women PhDs in psychology and a Columbia professor when academic positions for women were essentially unheard-of.

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Norsworthy 1906 mental tests for subnormal children. First US standardized child intelligence test. 40 items at age-graded difficulty 6-14 years, covering vocabulary, motor coordination (text-described), controlled association, attention, memory, perception, and reasoning.

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Source

All test materials and historical content on this page are transcribed from:

Norsworthy, N. (1906). The Psychology of Mentally Deficient Children. Columbia Teachers College.

Naomi Norsworthy (1877-1916) was a pioneering American educational psychologist at Columbia Teachers College, a student of E.L. Thorndike. Her test predates Goddard's 1908 English translation of the Binet-Simon scale.